WebMethods, Inc.

3930 Pender Drive

Fairfax, Virginia 22030
(703) 460-2500
www.webmethods.com

Sales

$194.5 million

Business Description 
We are a leading provider of software and services for end-to-end business integration solutions. We offer a set of software products that enable organizations to run, manage and optimize their business. Our software products and related services give organizations the ability, seamlessly and in real-time, to integrate disparate information resources, to connect customers, vendors and business partners with the organization and its employees, to view and manage the connected information resources, data, business processes and human workflows and to provide Web services at the enterprise level.

 We believe that the webMethods solution offers a compelling suite of capabilities to integrate information resources and provide Web services at the enterprise level to make Global 2000 companies and government organizations more agile. With webMethods’ solution, customers are able to more rapidly deploy information technology capabilities as they pursue competitive advantages, seek to secure more value from their existing information technology resources and strive to take advantage of standards-based technologies in their information technology infrastructure.

The strength of the webMethods solution derives from both the strength of our individual solutions and the synergies enabled by our combination of Service Oriented Architecture, business integration, Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and Composite Application Framework functionality. Historically, companies may have selected different products from different vendors to achieve these various capabilities, only to suffer from lack of integration between the different selected products. By combining these best-of-breed capabilities into one infrastructure, we offer customers the ability to lower their total cost of ownership and to streamline the overall implementation process.

The following are the core elements of webMethods’ solution:

webMethods Enterprise Services Platform

At the foundation of webMethods’ solution is the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, a set of software capabilities that enable customers to implement a powerful, reliable Service Oriented Architecture. webMethods calls this an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA). ESOA goes beyond simple Web services standards with features that enable the widespread deployment of Web services in a mission-critical business setting.
The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform includes the following features:

• Proven business integration functionality — inherited from our previous flagship offering, the webMethods Integration Platform — which allows companies to not only integrate existing applications and establish electronic communications with trading partners, but to incorporate these resources seamlessly into the Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture. The webMethods Integration Server, which unites enterprise application integration and business-to-business functionality under a common architecture, is the basis for this capability. As a foundation for business integration and Composite Application development, the webMethods Integration Server allows the customer’s information technology resources to be published, managed and orchestrated as Web services in a Service Oriented Architecture. With so much investment tied up in existing information technology systems, this is the most expedient and cost-effective path to populating a Service Oriented Architecture with the Web services that higher-level software tools, portals, and other service-based applications can leverage. The move to Web services also benefits downstream business integration initiatives through reusability and the reduced cost and complexity resulting from standardization.

• A robust, scalable, high performance event-driven messaging capability that allows the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform to support real-time, message-oriented interactions in addition to the Web services request/reply style of interaction. Enabled by the webMethods Broker, event-driven processing naturally complements Web services by providing the real-time capabilities that are needed for Business Activity Monitoring and other applications. The webMethods BrokerTM offers reliable message delivery and a scalable publish/subscribe architecture that is capable of processing thousands of messages per second. The webMethods Broker is also the basis of webMethods JMS+TM, a Java Message Service-compliant messaging solution that is offered as a standalone product.

• Enables implementation of an enterprise-caliber service-oriented infrastructure. Delivered by webMethods Fabric, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform enables enterprises to go from small, static, brittle, ad hoc networks of unmanaged Web services to larger, dynamic, robust, coordinated networks of managed Web services. webMethods Fabric can be deployed as an intermediary or in conjunction with either the Web service producer or Web service consumer or both. webMethods Fabric coordinates the use of Web services in a Service Oriented Architecture regardless of what technology was used to create those services including, but not limited to, webMethods software, J2EE application servers, .NET-based applications, other packaged applications or mainframe environments. With this flexible deployment architecture, customers can reduce network latency and create a more secure and robust environment for deploying a Service Oriented Architecture. These include capabilities such as Web services monitoring and management, service discovery, dynamic binding, failover and load-balancing, and intelligent message processing.

• An extensive library of adapters so that the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform can integrate the numerous proprietary interfaces presented by a broad variety of enterprise applications (e.g., supply chain management software from i2 Technologies, inter-enterprise software solutions from SAP AG, sales, marketing and customer relationship management software from Siebel Systems, customer relationship management and enterprise management software from PeopleSoft). The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform can also be extended by customers and partners through the use of webMethods software toolkits that allow them to develop interfaces to integrate custom applications or other software with the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform.

• Support for a wide range of electronic commerce protocols that enable our customers to automate and integrate their commercial transactions generated by their information technology resources with the information systems of their customers and business partners. Examples of these types of transactions include purchasing and procurement, supply chain management, collaborative product design and vendor-managed inventory. Our software supports a broad range of capabilities to support these and other initiatives of an enterprise to integrate its information resources with those of its customers and business partners. These protocols include XML, traditional and Internet EDI, Commerce One’s xCBL, RosettaNet, Chem eStandards and ebXML.

• A high-performance Java Web services platform with webMethods Glue. webMethods Glue eliminates the traditional complexity of Web services development. Targeted at the Java developer, webMethods Glue provides the fastest and easiest way to turn ordinary Java objects into Web services with very little incremental effort. By using webMethods Glue, developers can publish any Java object as a Web service using just a few lines of code, while remote Web services can be invoked as if they were local Java objects.

• Capabilities targeted at J2EE and .NET developers to make it easier for users of those technologies to connect their application into the Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture.

Business Process Management (BPM)

webMethods’ Business Process Management solution facilitates business process management, first, by providing capabilities for orchestrating both automated and manual processes; second, by promoting the creation of business-oriented services that can be reused across different processes; and, third, by providing a level of abstraction from the underlying systems that makes the task of orchestrating business processes accessible to the non-technical user. The webMethods Business Process Management tools also provide an intuitive design and development environment for incorporating manual workflows and custom user-interfaces into business process flows, allowing the webMethods solution to manage automated and manual tasks. The webMethods Business Process Management solution provides two core capabilities: an easy-to-use graphical tool for modeling business processes and orchestrating services, and a codeless design environment that allows organizations to create workflow solutions, including associated user interfaces, to monitor and manage manual processes.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

webMethods’ Business Activity Monitoring solution enables customers to achieve new levels of agility by monitoring their business operations on their information systems in real-time, identifying opportunities and diagnosing problems as they occur, and responding instantly to changes in business activity. The webMethods Business Activity Monitoring solution, webMethods Optimize, combines real-time awareness about business events with the ability to correlate information surrounding these events into meaningful feedback along the decision chain. This solution provides further value when the customer extends this correlation capability to the point of recommending responses or even predicting failures before they occur. With webMethods Optimize, companies are able to improve the speed and effectiveness of their decision-making by gaining complete real-time visibility into their business processes. webMethods offers a set of service offerings to support our customers’ implementation of our Business Activity Monitoring solution. These include the webMethods BAM Workshop, a facilitated on-site session which helps companies identify the business processes most appropriate for an initial Business Activity Monitoring implementation; a Business Process Report Card detailing the “as is” state of a business process with regard to its ability to meet its business commitments and identified Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s); and a BAM Assessment providing an in-depth analysis of a company’s key business processes with regard to their applicability and associated return on investment for Business Activity Monitoring.

Composite Application Framework

From the services and resources that are made available through the webMethods infrastructure, the webMethods Composite Application Framework enables customers to assemble a new breed of application. With minimal development, these composite business applications are able to deliver personalized access to other application software, data and business processes from across the enterprise. Instead of developing traditional client/server or Web applications using monolithic (and sometimes proprietary) technologies, the webMethods Composite Application Framework enables a process of assembly, using the inventory of Web services available within the webMethods-enabled Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture. As the key component of the webMethods Composite Application Framework, webMethods PortalTM provides the primary delivery mechanism for user interaction with these composite applications. webMethods Portal allows people — both inside and outside the customer — to be provided with personalized access to the information, business processes, and applications that are relevant to their job function or relationship to the organization. By promoting contextual views of business situations, the webMethods Composite Application Framework can enable webMethods’ customers to achieve significant gains in business efficiency, customer satisfaction, and decision-making capabilities.