News | June 25, 2009

Software AG Accelerates Process Improvement, SOA Enablement And Enterprise Integration With webMethods 8.0

  • With newest release of webMethods, Software AG introduces the world's first integrated Business Service Repository, linking SOA with Process Improvement initiatives
  • Enhanced capabilities of webMethods reduce by 25 percent or more the time and cost of improving processes and integrating systems and partners
  • New platform capabilities facilitate the Business-IT collaboration needed for enhanced visibility into services and processes and overall company performance
  • Latest release unveiled at the Gartner SOA & Application Development and Integration Summit, June 24-25, in London, England

Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, recently announced the latest release of its flagship webMethods platform, webMethods 8.0. The release enhances the ability of companies to capitalize on both open architecture and existing infrastructure investments, reduces the time and cost to improve processes and integrate systems, and enables dramatic end-user productivity through tighter collaboration between IT and the business.

With webMethods 8.0, Software AG continues to address the mission-critical business infrastructure software requirements of global enterprises with an emphasis on bringing together systems and partners and automating and improving processes that deliver faster time to value. Enterprises with large-scale projects can reduce time and cost by 25 percent or more, experiencing millions of dollars in savings. And, today's CEO is looking across all areas of the company to reduce cost, increase productivity and align IT with the business.

"In an increasingly competitive global environment, it is important that companies tie IT investments to business improvement, and get results quickly," said Dr. Peter Kuerpick, Chief Product Officer and Member of the Executive Board, Software AG. "webMethods 8.0 enables companies to accelerate their process improvement and SOA initiatives through improved reuse, streamlined development, and tight alignment of business and IT services. As a direct result, organizations can go "live" much faster and more cost-effectively, and business users can more easily drive continuous innovation and improvement."

"With webMethods 8.0, Software AG delivers a wealth of new functionality to satisfy customer demand, demonstrating our continued commitment to innovation that is vital to our industry leadership and competitive advantage," Dr. Kuerpick added.

The latest release expands on webMethod's market-leading capabilities by adding:

  • CentraSite ActiveSOA, the world's first integrated Business Service Repository to uniquely tie business process management (BPM) to service-oriented architecture (SOA), providing instant inspiration, reuse and change management to both the business and IT teams
  • Enhanced Business Process Management, with a new paradigm in end-user productivity through collaborative personal workspaces
  • webMethods Mediator, a new service mediation solution
  • A unified, Eclipse-based design environment for building, deploying, and managing projects across the SOA, BPM and Integration lifecycles
  • Embedded Business Intelligence to deliver process analytics to knowledge workers, allowing them to easily compare real-time performance against historical trends for informed decision-making
  • Business user self-service with intelligent applications and personal workspaces

With the tight integration of CentraSite ActiveSOA, Software AG offers the industry's first unified repository for business and technical services. Until now, organizations have been forced to maintain SOA assets in one registry and keep business process assets in a separate silo, thus forcing a disconnect between SOA and Process Improvement initiatives. webMethods 8.0, in conjunction with CentraSite ActiveSOA, puts all assets—including web services, integration-related services, and business process models, KPI's and more—in a single unified repository. This union of process and SOA governance provides visibility for IT and business users to collaborate, linking SOA assets directly to business initiatives – a major leap forward in the SOA and BPM markets.

According to Gartner, Inc., a leading industry analyst firm, "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) enable each other, but process governance must be coordinated with SOA governance to provide visibility and policy enforcement across multiple siloed domains."[1] webMethods 8.0 focuses on sharing actionable assets across IT and business for just these types of benefits.

webMethods 8.0 also provides new and expanded development and business process management capabilities. Specifically, the development interfaces have been consolidated into a single streamlined tool for configuration across the entire webMethods suite, greatly reducing the effort needed to go live with Integration, B2B, SOA and BPM. Software AG estimates that companies can reduce by 25 percent or more the time and cost to improve processes, deploy new services and applications, and integrate systems.

Additionally, webMethods 8.0 introduces webMethods Mediator. As services multiply and evolve, the most challenging aspect is managing change without disrupting the ongoing use of services by the business. Built on the webMethods ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) as a successor to webMethods X-Broker, Mediator simplifies managing the evolving relationship between service consumers and providers. With centralized, run-time management of heterogeneous SOA implementations, Mediator makes it easy to adapt your services for greater reuse.

webMethods 8.0 will launch as First Customer Ship on June 29. General availability is slated for December. For more information visit www.softwareag.com/webMethods8.

With more than 1,000 U.S.-enterprise customers and 700 employees, Software AG's U.S. operation contributes one third of the company's total revenue and is Software AG's largest market presence and R&D location. Software AG has operated nationwide in the U.S. since 1973 through a fully-owned subsidiary, Software AG USA Inc., which is headquartered in Reston, Virginia – also an R&D hub for the company's core data management and integration technologies. R&D labs for the development of Software AG's webMethods product suite – offering SOA integration and BPM solutions – include facilities in San José/Silicon Valley, Seattle and Denver. For more information, visit www.softwareag.com/us.

About Software AG
Software AG is the world's largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Our 4,000 global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by modernizing, integrating and automating their IT systems and processes. As a result, they rapidly build measurable business value and meet changing business demands. Based on our solutions, organizations are able to liberate and govern their data, systems, applications, processes and services – achieving new levels of business flexibility.

Our leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining our technology with industry expertise and best practices experience, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses – faster. Software AG has 40 years of global IT experience and over 3,500 employees serving customers in 70 countries.

SOURCE: Software AG