This morning, webMethods announced it has agreed to acquire privately-held Infravio for approximately $38 million in cash. This acquisition comes on the heels of webM's purchase of semantic metadata management technology company, Cerebra. Technology from both acquisitions will be incorporated into a future release of webM's Fabric. The answer to the burning question for current customers - "Will Infravio's products continue to be offered and supported standalone" - is "Yes".
Of course this is just the latest acquisition in the "SOA Governance" space. [I use quotes because there's more to governance than what comes in a box.] On August 23, BEA announced its acquisition of SOA repository vendor Flashline. And on July 25, HP announced its acquisition of Mercury - the new owner of Systinet. With Systinet, HP got the registry embedded in Oracle's Fusion and BEA's AquaLogic.
This makes LogicLibrary, a design time metadata repository and registry for SOA (and more), as the last independent standing. Looking at the names above, the natural assumption is LogicLibrary is next, perhaps by IBM. However, IBM embarked on a build plan for WebSphere Registry and Repository, and appears to be readying for an October launch.
This recent flurry of activity centers on design time metadata management, with hooks to runtime. The next frontier will be integration with IT operations (CMDB, ITIL, SML). Or as Todd says, the repistry. On that front, IBM picked up asset management software vendor MRO Software in August.
Speaking of enterprise level metadata management, I find myself intrigued with IBM's Viper (DB2 v9), the hybrid XML/relational database. What role will Viper play in IBM's plans?
Anyway, I digress. It looks like enterprises now have 3 choices in respect to design time "SOA Governance":
1. Adopt the registry/repository of your primary SOA platform provider (BEA, IBM, Oracle, WebM etc).
2. Adopt the registry/repository of your enterprise systems management provider (HP, IBM etc)
3. Go independent: LogicLibrary.
There is no one right answer. As always, act for your business. Keep the bigger (metadata management) picture in view.
Update: 9/11/2006 11:52am - Forgot the disclosure: None of the vendors mentioned in this post are clients of my firm, Elemental Links.
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