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Software AG Looks to SOA and BPM in 2008
1/7/2008
Software AG didn't have a BPM product itself, and so it looked to acquire webMethod's product to fill that void.
"For BPM, we were waiting for the right acquisition target," Totev said. "We understood that webMethods had developed in the last year a very strong BPM solution with very good adoption in the customer base."
SOA could help facilitate that BPM connection, but people needed to get SOA first, he added.
"Once SOA was understood, they would discover that from there on, it would be much easier to not only model business processes but connect them into something real and living in the datacenter, providing real data to real applications," Totev explained.
He added that they also had agreed that governance (the management aspect of SOA) would become a key issue as SOA adoption increased. Totev added that both predictions--the importance of BPM and governance--"were about right."
"People ask for SOA management, so we see this kind of market taking off and we also see BPM as the killer application on top of SOA," he said. "The BPM market--especially for the vendors coming from the SOA side--it's a very high-growth component in any of these portfolios. The more traditional human-centric BPM vendors have decent growth rates, but it's nothing compared to the SOA-based BPM approach."
The need for governance in SOA solutions stems from organizational complexity as companies have developed and reused services in an SOA environment over time. Totev described it as a consequence of the ease of generating services from existing and legacy code.
"It got so easy that people began to produce many of those services within an organization, which was good and it motivated people to go in the SOA direction," he explained. "On the other hand, it introduced a certain degree of chaos. Nothing is worse for an SOA project than having a couple of services that seem to do the same thing but nobody knows which one to use exactly."
So some sort of constraint model is needed with organizations, he added. Some of Software AG's customers, such as Credit Suisse and others, have addressed this issue by calling for governance boards, Totev said.
"In such a governance board, you would have representatives of the architecture group, representatives of the business line and also the developers, and they then would talk together on what strategic enterprise services that they would need." Totev added that "this kind of strategy really has brought together business and IT stakeholders to talk on common topics."
SOA in itself, with its service orientation, has helped internal business operations. Totev cited the example of Software AG customer Scandinavian Airlines, which views IT as an essential unit.
"Once they switched to a notion of talking about well defined services with service level agreements [and] well described functionality, it became much easier to describe to the stakeholders what work they are doing [and] what the impact of change will be, [and] what a particular service [was] touched or changed.
Totev said that there has been "great progress" in bringing the Software AG and webMethods teams together. The company announced the release webMethods 7.1 in September and its CentraSite governance edition in October. For 2008, Software AG has a couple of announcements planned for June, Totev said.
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc. You can contact Kurt at kmackie@1105media.com.
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