IBM, webMethods acquisitions boost integration

IBM and webMethods have each swallowed integration companies in order to nourish their respective offerings. At the same time, SeeBeyond has upgraded its suite, and an integration startup has thrown its first software product in the ring last week.

The moves by all four companies advance the way information is integrated and accessed, with a focus on EII (enterprise information integration) and Web services.

On the EII front, IBM has agreed to buy CrossAccess, whose eXadas integration technology Big Blue plans to incorporate into its DB2 Information Integrator. eXadas is designed to link mainframe databases with modern applications. 

For its part, Composite Software brought its flagship EII software, the Composite Information Server, to market last week. The Java-based Information Server acts as an abstraction layer, spanning multiple data sources, such as a data warehouse, relational database, or CRM application. 

Tom Dwyer, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, said that EII is becoming increasingly important in the move toward distributed computing.

“This is the Brave New World and this particular infrastructure component is a significant and necessary piece of that,” he said.

That is not to say, however, that EAI’s role is being diminished. webMethods, for instance, injected its integration offerings with Web services through two acquisitions. The company said it will acquire The Mind Electric for its GLUE Web services platform and GAIA Web services fabric which, when taken together, will enable the creation of Web services and management of environments that consist of multiple Web services. On the portal side, the company purchased the DataChannel Portal, which the company plans to Web services enable.

Also, SeeBeyond upgraded and rebranded its platform as the ICAN (Integrated Composite Application Network) suite. Version 5.0, which the company has called its most significant upgrade in four years, is J2EE-compliant and adds new components for building composite applications that assemble by linking together existing applications comprising a business process, adding some new business logic and creating a user interface for the resulting program.