Speaking of governance, WebMethods announced the acquisition of governance vendor Infravio for $38 mil. The sale of Infravio follows the acquisition of other several deals. Last month...BEA Systems acquired Flashline. Earlier this year, Mercury Interactive bought Infravio competitor Systinet.

Both companies have good products; indeed WebMethods has one of the best traditional EAI products that are looking to become "SOAtized" and modernized. However, sales recently have been lackluster based on them missing a quarter. But, a good company is a good company; they typically recover from stuff like that...speaking from experience.

WebMethods has been on the acquisition track for some time, starting with the acquisition of Active Software many years ago, and has done many more between Active and Infravio. I’m sure some technologies adding value, some not as much. So, what about this deal?

I suspect that the driving force behind this acquisition is the fact that the other major integration and SOA players are adding governance to their respective stacks, either building or buying. What is more, many in the market are asking or governance solutions of part of a complete SOA product offering, and this is their response to both protect their market position and generate new name sales.

The challenge will be the integration of all their technologies to form a complete solution that will be acceptable in the marketplace, and with components the market is looking for. The risk is that the components won't be best-of-breed, and thus considering the all-or-nothing approach, a few bad subsystems will lower the value of the better SOA components. Governance, for instance, is a new concept (with old approaches, really), and changing approaches, enabling technology, and standards could mean that while you’ve built and amazing sports car, the lack of a modern drive train limits the capabilities of the complete car. Avoiding this takes a lot of planning, and some good luck. That will be the challenge at WebMethods, I suspect.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on September 13, 2006 05:01 AM