WebMethods makes Infravio its second recent SOA buy

Business integration suite vendor WebMethods Inc. is on the acquisition trail again, this time looking to pick up expertise in SOA (service-oriented architecture) governance through the planned purchase of Infravio Inc.

WebMethods announced Monday that it has reached a definitive agreement to buy Infravio for about US$38 million in cash and expects the deal to close later this month. Infravio is the vendor's second SOA-focused acquisition in recent weeks. Last month, BOSTON (09/11/2006) - WebMethods purchased most of the assets of semantic metadata management technology company Cerebra for an undisclosed sum.

As the SOA market continues to consolidate, larger players are busily picking off smaller firms, especially those with particular areas of focus, be they around technologies or specific industries.

Infravio's registry, repository and governance products help companies enforce policies and practices to better control the design, development and deployment of their SOA projects.

WebMethods plans to integrate Infravio's offerings into future versions of its Fabric SOA suite by the fourth quarter of this year. The Fabric suite brings together tools to help users improve the management of their business processes within an SOA framework and gain a better understanding of how their existing IT assets, including Web services, function and interoperate.

WebMethods plans to continue to sell and support stand-alone versions of Infravio's products both before and after the completion of the acquisition. Infravio customers include Lockheed Martin Corp., Providence Health System and Sprint Nextel Corp.

Infravio's software will help improve and add to WebMethods' capabilities in a number of areas including automatic content validation, service-level agreement management, security enforcement and versioning and impact analysis.

Established in 1999, privately-held Infravio employs around 65 staff, 50 of whom are developers in its offshore unit in Chennai, India.