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Software AG delivers faster customer value with the webMethods product suite

July 25, 2007

Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, has unveiled the webMethods product suite as the industry’s most comprehensive product portfolio for business integration, service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), and legacy modernisation. With industry-leading technology spanning the entire portfolio, the webMethods product suite maintains and extends current investments in Software AG’s Crossvision and webMethods technologies.

The fully integrated and optimised product suite ultimately delivers faster and more significant payback from enterprise investments in business infrastructure software. These benefits include faster implementation, more powerful collaboration, codeless development, extended reuse of IT assets, and lower operating costs.

“Customers will benefit greatly as our combined product suite delivers significant enhancements within every segment,” said Dr. Peter Kürpick, Software AG’s executive board member with management responsibilities for the webMethods business line. “The depth and breadth of the webMethods product suite and the industry leading performance that it delivers is unsurpassed competitively. By moving quickly to capitalise on the webMethods acquisition, we’re delivering on our commitment to being a leader in the SOA and BPM markets. Going forward, our expanded product portfolio will also allow us to be aggressive in building upon this foundation to deliver additional customer innovation and value.”

The webMethods product suite maintains current functionality while delivering a number of major enhancements. Existing Crossvison customers will benefit from richer support for business integration and B2B; a more deeply integrated business process management suite (BPMS); award-winning business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities; and additional resources for composite application development. webMethods users will enjoy access to a full-suite of legacy modernisation products; additional support for application development; and an expanded ESB offering. Both sets of customers will also benefit from the accelerated development of a best-in-class foundation for SOA lifecycle governance. The latter builds upon Software AG’s continuing commitment to jointly develop the CentraSite platform with Fujitsu.

Software AG also announced that it expects to ship the next release of the webMethods products – version 7.1 – later this summer as scheduled. This forthcoming release builds upon earlier themes of accelerating application delivery, fostering re-use as a cost and time-saving alternative to development, and enabling faster, smarter business decisions as a means for achieving sustainable process improvements. This release is also distinguished by its focus on expanding the extensibility of SOA as well as by the enhancements its delivers for the product suite’s best-in-class, standards-based enterprise service bus (ESB) offering.

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Technical specifications

webMethods product suite at a glance: Software AG addresses the critical business infrastructure software requirements of global enterprises

Enterprises need a fully integrated business infrastructure to cost-effectively support rapid change and continuous innovation. Software AG’s comprehensive approach to business infrastructure software ensures this necessary alignment and optimisation of processes, systems and data within heterogeneous environments. This maximises business responsiveness while enabling enterprises to manage IT as a portfolio for maximum efficiency.

Fundamental to these efforts is the webMethods product suite, which helps enterprises transform legacy systems and data into more productive corporate assets, integrate disparate applications, implement SOA and improve critical business processes. By bringing these capabilities together within a single product suite, enterprises can achieve faster business results. Customers also benefit from the additional synergies – more powerful collaboration, lower operating costs, greater productivity and simplified reuse of corporate IT assets – enabled by the use of a single business infrastructure software platform.

Due to the highly complementary nature of their respective technologies, the acquisition will accelerate each company’s product roadmap as key features become more quickly available. Customers will benefit almost immediately from this enhanced portfolio of products. At the same time, the expanded user community created by the acquisition will serve to maximise long-term value.

Specific features of the webMethods product suite include:

SOA governance – Software AG will bring together CentraSite and the webMethods Infravio X-Registry to create an unparalleled platform for addressing the full SOA governance lifecycle. As a result, CentraSite’s extensible metadata management and modeling capabilities will be enriched by the addition of the policy management and enforcement functionality offered by Infravio. In addition to establishing uniform governance of IT assets, the unified offering also simplifies asset maintenance by automatically defining semantic relationships and dependencies between assets. Software AG will also be merging the CentraSite and SOA Link communities to create an even more powerful SOA governance community.
ESB & B2B – The webMethods ESB builds upon webMethods’ enterprise-class Integration Server to deliver proven performance, scalability, security and support for key industry standards. Customers will now benefit from three complementary and interchangeable choices for integration and interoperability within a single product architecture. More specifically, the webMethods ESB will be offered in Mediation, Orchestration and Integration editions for progressively more demanding requirements. These products encompass and replace the webMethods Infravio X-Broker, the Crossvision Service Orchestrator and the webMethods Integration Server products respectively. Furthermore, Software AG will also be introducing enhancements to the webMethods B2B offering, such as trading partner self-service and business analytics spanning partner transactions, in the forthcoming release.
BPM and BAM – The top-ranked webMethods BPMS is the company’s primary business process management offering going forward. The business process management suite includes process and application design and execution, human workflow, rules, simulation and out-of-the-box process analytics. Leveraging their strong partnership, Software AG will also continue to fully support the Fujitsu Interstate offering for a minimum of five years. The webMethods product suite is also differentiated by the availability of powerful application composition capabilities that allow end-users to effortlessly create AJAX-based, Web 2.0 style rich Internet applications and user interfaces. Software AG also plans to extend webMethods’ patented business activity monitoring capabilities with new editions targeting additional business requirements.
Legacy Modernisation – Software AG will continue to offer three holistic approaches for mainframe integration – EntireX for transaction-oriented integration; ApplinX for screen-based integration; and CONNX Solutions’ data access products for data-focused integration. EntireX will be enhanced through the inclusion of webMethods’ patented mainframe integration technology. This means that current users of webMethods Mainframe will be able to migrate their existing functionality to the EntireX platform. Software AG will also continue to fully support webMethods’ DataDirect NEON Shadow customers.

Other available components of the product suite include Information Integrator for creating customised views of information from existing business data and Master Data Manager for unifying and consolidating master data throughout the enterprise.

Forthcoming releases are designed to remain backwards compatible with previous products. Enhanced products with standards-based interoperability will begin shipping this quarter will full availability of the upgraded product suite expected to commence in early 2008.

With over 4,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries and annual revenues rapidly approaching $1 billion USD, the acquisition establishes Software AG as a global leader in the business infrastructure software market with significant strengths in the SOA and BPM sectors. Software AG’s webMethods business line brings together the company’s Crossvision business unit with the newly acquired webMethods resources. This newly combined unit is being managed by Dr. Kürpick and draws upon executives from both companies as part of its leadership team. In terms of size, it will be a full peer with Software AG’s Enterprise Transaction Systems (ETS) business line, which encompasses the company’s Adabas and Natural resources.

About the company

About Software AG (www.softwareag.com)
Software AG is Europe’s largest system software company with a turnover in excess of €438 million per annum, and a global workforce of approximately 2,750 employees. It supports the mission-critical systems of over 3,000 customers globally in Government, finance, insurance, pharmaceuticals, retail and manufacturing.

The company’s German parent company and other affiliates around the world have provided solutions specifically for the public sector since the company was founded in 1969. Worldwide, key public sector clients include the European Parliament, the State of California and the cities of New York, Munich and Bremen.

Software AG (UK) Limited has been providing solutions to local authorities, government departments and agencies in the UK for over 25 years. Central government customers include PITO, the IND and the DVLA, with local authority customers ranging from the smallest – Rutland County Council to the largest – Birmingham City Council, demonstrating the scalability of the company’s approach.

Software AG’s proposition is centred on its ability to combine its award winning process driven integration suite and enterprise transaction products into a common, service oriented (SOA) platform.

Contact details

For further press information and photography please contact:
Tulna Shah or Steve George at LEWIS PR
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7802 2626 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7802 2627
softwareaguk@lewispr.com
Internet: www.softwareag.com

For sales enquiries, please contact Nikki Newton at Software AG UK:
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 403 800
Website: www.softwareag.com

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