WebMethods said that it expects to close the agreement in seven to 10 business days. And, within a month, it will rebrand the Infravio registry and repository as a separate product for its sales force to sell. It also promised to integrate the product as part of the forthcoming webMethods 7 release, planned for the end of the year.
Unless you include third parties like service-oriented architecture (SOA) Software, which offers a registry as part of a larger governance and integration offering, the Infravio deal takes the last of the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) registry pure plays off the table. It follows HP’s recently announced intention to buy Mercury, which in turn owned Systinet, the other major registry player. It also follows by a few weeks BEA Systems’ announcement that it has closed a deal to buy repository supplier Flashline.
Admittedly, there is a major functional difference between registry and repository, but given that Infravio has features of both, it’s understandable to confuse both as part of the same market.
Nonetheless, with ratification of the UDDI 3 standards, UDDI registries themselves have become commodities. BEA resells the Systinet product, now part of Mercury (and, if the acquisition closes, part of HP). Microsoft includes a UDDI registry as part of Windows Server 2003, while IBM offers one as part of WebSphere Application Server. And the list goes on.
Consequently, for a company known for a point product, and one that’s become commodity, and with less than $1 million annual sales, Infravio has drawn more than its share of attention.
This is largely due to aggressive positioning, plus the fact that the company has been around since before web services standards existed. Its original product, Xregistry, was initially based on ebXML standards that were more ambitious, complex and cumbersome than the UDDI standards that eventually superseded them.
Until last year, when Infravio finally brought its products to UDDI 3.0 compliance, rivals complained that Infravio’s product was not fully standards-based. Yet, given the embryonic nature of the market, where technology and standards were a moving target, such critiques also proved a bit hollow.
Not surprisingly, although Infravio is best known for its UDDI registry, that was the least exciting aspect of the deal, according to webMethods’ Kristin Muhlner, executive vice president of product development. Instead, webMethods spins the acquisition as one that adds the last piece to its SOA governance stack.
In essence, the stack would include the Infravio registry and repository, where policies are stored; webMethods’ recent Cerebra acquisition, which provides an inference engine that analyzes policy semantics; and its existing service management console product for monitoring policy compliance at run time.
Admittedly, to some, the presence of webMethods in the run time SOA governance space is news. We have not seen webMethods [in run time governance] prior to this acquisition, said Ed Horst, marketing vice president for rival AmberPoint. While AmberPoint has a vested interest in dismissing its competitor, it is better known in the space. And prior to the acquisition, AmberPoint had a gentleman’s agreement with Infravio to develop an interface as part of Infravio’s SOA Link alliance program.
For the record, webMethods will look into seeing whether it will continue the SOA Link program, and what aspects of it. Fortunately, for webMethods, since the SOA Link program was mostly a series of moral promises, rather than a firm technology or marketing program, it has little to risk regarding whether it continues the program.
Furthermore, regardless of whether webMethods was known for run time governance or not, much of the real value of the acquisition is in Infravio’s 50-person Chennai development lab, which boosts webMethods’ existing Indian foothold (it already had 70 developers in Bangalore). Post-acquisition, webMethods would have a third of its developer force in India.
Nonetheless, governance is likely to become major battleground among middle tier and platform vendors.
IBM fired an opening shot by ramping up its alliance with WebLayers, which takes an enterprise architecture approach to services governance. If HP clears its acquisition of Mercury, it would be logical to pair its SOA management capabilities (from a three-year old acquisition of Talking Blocks) with the registry of Systinet, the business services dashboards of Mercury, and the data center operational capabilities of OpenView. And in all likelihood, Oracle and SAP won’t stay silent either.
