Software AG accelerates process improvement, SOA enablement and enterprise integration with webMethods 8.0

The release enhances the ability of companies to capitalise on both open architecture and existing infrastructure investments, reduces the time and cost to improve processes and integrate systems, and enables dramatic end-user productivity through tighter collaboration between IT and the business.

With webMethods 8.0, Software AG continues to address the mission-critical business infrastructure software requirements of global enterprises with an emphasis on bringing together systems and partners and automating and improving processes that deliver faster time to value.

Enterprises with large-scale projects can reduce time and cost by 25% or more, experiencing millions of dollars in savings. And, today's CEO is looking across all areas of the company to reduce cost, increase productivity and align IT with the business.

"In an increasingly competitive global environment, it is important that companies tie IT investments to business improvement, and get results quickly," said Dr. Peter Kuerpick, Chief Product Officer and Member of the Executive Board, Software AG. "webMethods 8.0 enables companies to accelerate their process improvement and SOA initiatives through improved reuse, streamlined development, and tight alignment of business and IT services. As a direct result, organisations can go 'live' much faster and more cost-effectively, and business users can more easily drive continuous innovation and improvement."

"With webMethods 8.0, Software AG delivers a wealth of new functionality to satisfy customer demand, demonstrating our continued commitment to innovation that is vital to our industry leadership and competitive advantage," Dr. Kuerpick added.

Marco Gerazounis, Senior Vice President, Software AG, Middle East, said:

"webMethods 8.0 is a major breakthrough that will complement the widespread technology and IT adoption across both government and private sectors in the Middle East. IT expenditure in the region has been rising over the past few years as companies take advantage of new technology solutions to optimise their operations in new and emerging markets. webMethods 8.0 is the perfect solution that will help them achieve a seamless integration of newly acquired IT tools and their existing IT infrastructure."

The latest release expands on webMethod's market-leading capabilities by adding:
- CentraSite ActiveSOA, the world's first integrated Business Service Repository to uniquely tie business process management (BPM) to service-oriented architecture (SOA), providing instant inspiration, reuse and change management to both the business and IT teams
- Enhanced Business Process Management, with a new paradigm in end-user productivity through collaborative personal workspaces
- webMethods Mediator, a new service mediation solution
- A unified, Eclipse-based design environment for building, deploying, and managing projects across the SOA, BPM and Integration lifecycles
- Embedded Business Intelligence to deliver process analytics to knowledge workers, allowing them to easily compare real-time performance against historical trends for informed decision-making
- Business user self-service with intelligent applications and personal workspaces

With the tight integration of CentraSite ActiveSOA, Software AG offers the industry's first unified repository for business and technical services. Until now, organisations have been forced to maintain SOA assets in one registry and keep business process assets in a separate silo, thus forcing a disconnect between SOA and Process Improvement initiatives.

webMethods 8.0, in conjunction with CentraSite ActiveSOA, puts all assets—including web services, integration-related services, and business process models, KPI's and more—in a single unified repository. This union of process and SOA governance provides visibility for IT and business users to collaborate, linking SOA assets directly to business initiatives - a major leap forward in the SOA and BPM markets.

According to Gartner, Inc., a leading industry analyst firm, "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) enable each other, but process governance must be coordinated with SOA governance to provide visibility and policy enforcement across multiple siloed domains." webMethods 8.0 focuses on sharing actionable assets across IT and business for just these types of benefits.

webMethods 8.0 also provides new and expanded development and business process management capabilities. Specifically, the development interfaces have been consolidated into a single streamlined tool for configuration across the entire webMethods suite, greatly reducing the effort needed to go live with Integration, B2B, SOA and BPM. Software AG estimates that companies can reduce by 25% or more the time and cost to improve processes, deploy new services and applications, and integrate systems.

Additionally, webMethods 8.0 introduces webMethods Mediator. As services multiply and evolve, the most challenging aspect is managing change without disrupting the ongoing use of services by the business. Built on the webMethods ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) as a successor to webMethods X-Broker, Mediator simplifies managing the evolving relationship between service consumers and providers. With centralised, run-time management of heterogeneous SOA implementations, Mediator makes it easy to adapt your services for greater reuse.

webMethods 8.0 is slated for general availability in December 2009.