Following on from its August acquisition of metadata management vendor Cerebra in late August, webMethods has just announced that it is buying registry and governance software purveyor, Infravio.
WebMethods has had some issues of late with revenue in its latest quarter down 3.5% year on year, and it clearly feels that a few acquisitions will help it find its feet again. It’s clearly pinning its hopes on service oriented architecture (SOA) – registries from the likes of Infravio are pretty vital in SOA as without them it’s tricky to store, share, query and indeed reuse your enterprise’s services.
In a release WebMethods said: “Once integrated within the webMethods Fabric product suite, Infravio’s leading SOA registry and governance solutions, coupled with the semantic metadata technologies recently acquired from Cerebra, will enable users to accelerate SOA adoption throughout their enterprise.”
WebMethods is paying $38m in cash for Infravio, which was privately held. Not a bad price compared to the $105m cash Mercury Interactive paid for fellow registry player Systinet back in January, but Systinet had around 170 customers (Infravio says it has “numerous” customers).
Infravio was founded in 1999, based on a research project at the Stanford University department of Computer Science, where founder Mukund Balasubramanian was conducting graduate studies. This research was the basis for the patents on Contract-Based Enterprise Software Delivery, the technology underlying the company’s Service Delivery Contracts.
Infravio is headquartered in Cupertino, California, but its primary development centre is in Chennai India, where its founders hail from.
My first take is that this is a good buy for webMethods, as the registry and repository are clearly now seen as key to SOA – witness Mercury’s Systinet acquisition, or BEA’s recent purchase of Flashline. WebMethods says the deal will be accretive to earnings form the first quarter of next year so that’s good news, but the question for all these companies is how well they are able to integrate their repositories with their tooling and overarching SOA platforms, and how quickly they can get all of their marketing ducks in a row.
“With the acquisition of Infravio, combined with our recent acquisition of Cerebra, we are demonstrating our commitment to doing SOA the right way – a way that actually addresses real market needs and challenges,” said David Mitchell, webMethods president and CEO.
He said Infravio’s registry, repository and SOA governance software are expected to be integrated within the webMethods Fabric product suite by calendar Q4 2006.
