News

WebMethods, Informatica team up on business monitor

• By Jack Vaughan
• April 16, 2003

The rough lines between XML-oriented middleware and business analytics blurred a bit more this week as webMethods Inc. and Informatica Corp. unveiled a joint offering known as the Business Activity Platform for enterprise integration and real-time operations analysis. The effort seeks to improve the lot of businesses that want to more effectively monitor their operations.

The Business Activity Platform -- which will be jointly marketed and sold by integration vendor webMethods and analytics house Informatica -- is a specialized amalgam of webMethods business process modeler and integration platform, and Informatica's ETL engine and Power Center analytical server.

As these are key players, this pairing will be closely watched. "We jointly engaged customers for more than a year. We got feedback and did joint development," said Dan Niemann, director of product marketing at Informatica.

"This fulfills the requirements for what Gartner group calls Business Activity Monitoring [BAM], as well as what we call enterprise integration," Niemann said. He added that emerging techniques of Web services are employed in the product. The webMethods modeler introspects the Informatica Power Center Engine "as a service," he noted.

Niemann said that as BAM gains traction in organizations, there is a need for customers to support both bulk-batch and real-time processes from a single platform.

"We have pre-built meta data and data integration between our product suites," he said. "When a customer needs to do bulk data transfers and they want a single tool to manage that as part of a business process, that comes right out of the box."