News

Buy and Build: webMethods Releases New Version of BPM/SOA Platform

• By Kathleen Richards
• January 3, 2007

On December 22, webMethods shipped version 7.0 of its flagship Fabric suite. The 7.0 release followed a year of acquisitions as the company put key technology in place for its BPM/SOA platform.

The BPM suite offers an Eclipse-based modeling tool that uses Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to enable users to analyze IT operations and business metrics to find out "how things behave" in order to optimize business processes, explains Matt Green, senior director, product management.

The suite's design environment supports "codeless" application development, letting users drag and drop IT assets such as services into process templates and link them together. Users can also drag and drop AJAX-enabled widgets from a library of 150 controls to create dashboard components. Fair Isaacs' Blaze Advisor technology is embedded a business rules engine.

The SOA components of the platform have been beefed up with technology from webMethods' recent acquisitions: two governance products from registry-repository provider InFravio and a new metadata management library built using standards-based semantic technology from Cerebra. The embedded Cerebra technology is designed to recognize metadata from any IT source (Web services, business processes, governance policies, documents and user profiles) using the Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language, and store it as a reusable IT asset in a searchable repository, according to the company.

The webMethods InFravio X-Registry includes an integrated UDDI v.3.0 repository for tracking policies and data related to business services. The webMethods Infravio X-Broker is a messaging and orchestration engine for managing Web services. Although part of the Fabric 7.0 suite, both applications are still available on a standalone basis, because there is wide demand for governance and registry products.

The webMethods Fabric 7.0 suite is available now. The company is offering special pricing for certain configurations--webMethods for BPM, webMethods for B2B and webMethods Optimize (BAM)--through its "Quick Start" program until March 31.