IBM Expands SOA Offerings With Webify Acquisition

IBM has announced it acquired Webify Solutions, an Austin, Tex.-based privately held provider of industry-specific software and services for building service-oriented architectures (SOA). Financial terms were not disclosed. Webify technology will be integrated immediately into IBM Software Group under the WebSphere brand. It also will be available through IBM Global Services offerings.Webify software helps accelerate the development and deployment of applications that business users need to respond to market and competitive pressures. Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt, standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. The company’s offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA compliance for healthcare companies and ACORD standards in the insurance industry. By bringing together IBM’s development and use of open industry standards with Webify’s expertise in semantics, IBM believes it can better solve common business problems in a given vertical industry. Together, IBM and Webify will help businesses run more efficiently by accelerating the integration of business processes and the sharing and reuse of proven applications and best practices.Webify software combines these semantics with industry-specific tools and frameworks to help customers develop composite business applications to grow revenue, decrease costs, and comply with government and industry regulations. Composite business applications borrow capabilities from existing applications to develop new functionality not found in existing applications. These proprietary applications originally were designed without the ability to communicate and share business functionality with one another. The combination of IBM’s WebSphere integration middleware and services capabilities along with Webify’s industry expertise can allow customers to link complete business processes and share data regardless of underlying technologies. Webify software will be delivered as part of the IBM WebSphere portfolio, which includes WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server, and the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. IBM Global Services (IGS) will use Webify software to deliver industry-focused reusable services to clients. IGS will gain immediate access to Webify’s library of composite business services to help speed delivery of mission-critical industry applications. These capabilities will complement the recently announced IBM Global Business Solution Center (GBSC) in India that is dedicated to the development of SOA-based composite business services. In addition, composite business services offered by IGS will be listed in the IBM SOA Business Catalog. Manoj Saxena, Webify chairman and CEO, will continue to manage Webify and will undertake additional responsibilities for IBM’s SOA strategy, reporting to Robert LeBlanc, general manager of IBM WebSphere software. Through this acquisition, 120 Webify employees based in Austin and Mumbai, India, will become IBM employees.