At its annual Integration World conference in Orlando today and on the heels of its quarterly earnings report last week, Software AG announced a series of partnerships and product enhancements that it hopes will contribute to its plan of becoming a $1 billion company by next fiscal year.
Central to the plan are a number of new and expanded partnerships, upon which Software AG hopes to build out its grand vision of an IT infrastructure that is quickly adaptable and delivers needed information to all stakeholders within its clients' organizations.
A new piece of that vision is the integration of business intelligence into the company's technology offerings. On a Web cast today, Software AG officials said a new partnership with business intelligence software purveyor Cognos will help create a consolidated product portfolio that ties together business intelligence, business activity monitoring, and business process management on a services-oriented IT infrastructure.
Beginning in mid-2008, officials said, Software AG will embed Cognos' business intelligence technology in the webMethods product line as a standard feature with pre-built reports.
According to Matt Green, product line director for process applications in the webMethods unit, the addition of business intelligence rounds out the data analysis capabilities in webMethods' technology. Business activity monitoring, he said, detects problems or exceptions in business activities; business intelligence allows users to drill down and provide context to those exceptions and also assign them priority; business process management lets workers tweak the processes to alleviate the problem; and business rules management acts as the enforcement engine for the resultant rules.
"We're looking for a complete solution for reporting end to end across the webMethods platform," Green said, "so virtually every [webMethods] product will be able to run and produce standardized reports that will ship with the product."
The new BI capabilities will be free and standard in webMethods products; for businesses that want to create customized reports, developer's licenses will be available at an unspecified cost.
Peter Kürpick, chief product officer (CPO) for the webMethods business, said that the expansion of Software AG's SOA technologies will answer a growing market need. "We think here at Software AG that we're at the edge of a paradigm shift when it comes to using SOA and BPM to bring more agility to the enterprise," he said.
On today's Web cast, Kürpick likened the maturation of SOA to the emergence of the product lifecycle management concept in the automotive world. In the 1980s and 1990s, using PLM tools, automakers were able to reduce the average lifecycle of a vehicle platform from eight to 10 years to about three years. The centralized data management of a PLM system and the collaborative nature of the process meant an engineer could extract a piece of the design, enhance it, and quickly reincorporate it into the overall design with a complete understanding of how the change would affect the whole design.
Similar transparency and agility are now being applied to business processes, he said. And going forward, end users will have more influence than ever on how applications are composed and reconfigured. To that end, he said, Software AG is investing heavily in so-called Web 2.0 technology, including AJAX tools, to create user interfaces that will allow the business user to participate in the design and configuration of processes and applications. In this way, business process management will extend to more users who can use more intuitive ways to interact with services, he said. The new interfaces are expected to debut sometime in 2008.
Software AG also announced an expanded global partnership with IT services and integration provider Tata Consultancy. Together, the two companies will create vertical market-specific webMethods offerings with industry knowledge embedded in them. Officials expect most of these releases to roll out next summer, with the first, a framework for manufacturing, due in the first quarter of 2008.
Yet another alliance announced at this week's user conference is a pact with Layer 7 through which Software AG will sell Layer 7's gateway software for use with the webMethods product suite. Layer 7's technology provides security and policy control in an SOA environment.
Buoyed by the new partnerships as well as earnings results last week that showed a strong contribution from the webMethods products, Software AG officials today reiterated their expectation that the company will reach $1 billion in revenue by next fiscal year. Officials said the company is on track to notch $900 million in sales in fiscal 2007.