webMethods Tightly Weaves Fabric for Business Applications
Type: Competitive Intelligence Report
Analyst: S. Willett
Report Date: April 18, 2005
Module: Application Infrastructure
ID: CIR13586 |
Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: Moderate |
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Summary
Event Summary
April 18, 2005 -- webMethods Inc., announced the latest release of webMethods Fabric, the first integrated product suite to improve corporate performance through increased business process productivity. webMethods Fabric 6.5 offers several features to accelerate the delivery of business applications to the business, as well as delivering patent-pending technology to enable unprecedented real-time visibility and predictability into the business processes of an enterprise.
Analytical Summary
• Current Perspective: Positive on the new version of Fabric, as webMethods is taking firm steps to present a unified platform of integration, SOA management, BAM, and BPM, with higher level features for business analysts.
• Vendor Importance: High to webMethods as the firm needed to revise its new unified all-in-one platform in order to gain an edge over competitors with more disparate offerings and appeal to users designing higher level BPM-type applications.
• Market Impact: Moderate on the market as webMethods has had the elements of Fabric for 18 months, giving competitors a chance to adjust. Most already have many of the components of Fabric, although competitors need to start looking at SOA management.
Target Markets
Global 2000, Large Enterprises, Small to Medium Enterprises
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Perspective
Current Perspective: Positive
We are taking a positive stance on the release of webMethods Fabric 6.5, a major enhancement to its all-inclusive suite, which includes traditional integration, BPM, BAM, SOA management, and a portal in one offering. webMethods has improved the individual elements, and the linkages between the elements with this release, making the suite more attractive (see "webMethods Wraps Product Line in New Fabric," October 14, 2004). More development and viewing interfaces for non IT users are also included, making it more attractive as a platform for “composite application” development.
webMethods, like most other EAI players, is set on moving beyond offering the mere “plumbing” of integration, as that market becomes partially commoditized and saturated. The prize for these former infrastructure players is the market for composite applications, which reside on top of a services layers, and could conceivably replace traditional applications and development tools. webMethods, like others, is riding the wave of making IT more of a tool for business users, rather than having the limitations of infrastructure crimp business plans. While this is a goal most agree on, the problem is that most users still need infrastructure, and buy and manage it separately for a wide variety of reasons that are rather difficult to solve overnight (complexity is the main one). Thus, webMethods and other integration players that are moderate in size must walk a delicate line of tailoring products and selling to those building business applications, without alienating or ignoring the traditional IT infrastructure market.
With Fabric 6.5, the company is attempting to walk that line. It has added an “analyst mode” for its BPM tool, which provides a more limited choice of technical development options, drag and drop process development, and disconnected (laptop) development (a Java Swing client is required). This same representation can later be used to view the runtime of the process. Business analysts can also feed process information into KPIs that are set through the firm’s Optimize and/or Dashboard product, and monitor processes in that way. The KPIs, and most other non-technical views of data, can be surfaced through the firm’s portal, which can serve as a task-based interface for analysts or line of business managers. With 6.5, the company has enhanced Servicenet, its SOA management product, with UDDI discover, and support for new WS-Security and SAML assertions. Reporting has been enhanced as data from Servicenet, the BPM product, or the firm’s traditional “Manager” product can be fed into a multidimensional star schema format. There are other improvements as well. The performance of the core JMS engine has been increased by 12 times, and portal development has been improved (see "webMethods Offers an Update to its Portal," March 18, 2005).
On the negative side, the analyst mode is only for the webMethods Modeler and doesn’t include the firm’s “Workflow” product, which handles human workflow. The company should work to unify Workflow and Modeler eventually in order to match pure play BPM vendors. webMethods has indicated that much of the new selling efforts around Fabric will concentrate on vertical or horizontal suites, but it hasn’t yet debuted these new solutions. In fact, webMethods’ main problem with Fabric is that it is mixing EAI “plumbing” and traditional IT systems management type of functions (Servicenet) with higher level BPM/BAM development functions in the same suite. The reality is that many user organizations may not be ready to buy off on this. It should therefore make it easy to substitute out elements of Fabric through strong standards support (e.g., JSR 168, Eclipse, etc.) and alliances with third parties. It should emphasize this capability. It should also consider an “IT infrastructure” suite.
Competitors should strongly consider SOA management (at least parts of it) as part of their infrastructure suite. Competitors such as IBM and TIBCO, who have a wide variety of products, will likely closely monitor webMethods. However, users shouldn’t expect a single product, as these firms make too much money selling them individually, and most organizations purchase products this way in any case. Users should expect continued efforts by integration players to appeal to business developers through development tools, dashboards, and other elements.
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Positives and Concerns
Competitive Positives
• webMethods introduces Fabric 6.5, a major enhancement to its all-inclusive suite, which includes traditional integration, BPM, BAM, SOA management, and a portal in one offering. The company has gone beyond simply putting the products in one package, and actually has several points of integration and common interfaces. webMethods has a differentiator in having one sellable package with all this functionality. It also has SOA management, something most pure plays don’t have. This makes it a compelling suite for those looking for SOA composite application infrastructure. The company plans on following up with Fabric-based vertical suites, which will probably be the most likely way most customers will buy the suite. Meanwhile, users can still buy individual elements, such as the integration broker, separately.
• The company is making Fabric more attractive for non-IT users. It has added an “analyst mode” for its BPM tool, which provides a more limited choice of technical development options, drag and drop process development, and disconnected (laptop) development (a Java Swing client is required). This same representation can later be used to view the runtime of the process. Business analysts can also feed process information into KPIs that are set through the firm’s Optimize and/or Dashboard product, and monitor processes in that way. The KPIs, and most other non-technical views of data, can be surfaced through the firm’s portal, which can serve as a task-based interface for analysts or line of business managers. These features make it more likely that customers will turn to webMethods for value-added applications, rather than plumbing, especially when vertically-oriented suites with custom dashboards are released by the firm.
• With 6.5, the company has enhanced Servicenet, its SOA management product (which formerly had the name of the Fabric). The product now supports UDDI (version 2, with future full support for version 3) discovery of services, and supports new WS-Security options for message level security as well as SAML assertion. It can call out to third-party user authentication systems as well. Data collected from services is fed into Optimize, so sophisticated analysis can be done, including KPIs, and self-setting of performance “norms.” Monitoring can be surfaced through the webMethods portal (although the development interface remains separate), so general IT can get an overview of problems and even non-technical users can get a handle on problems with specific services. Although the functionality does not exceed many pure plays in the SOA management space (e.g., Amberpoint, Actional, SOA Software, etc.), the integration with a BAM tool and a generalized portal will be attractive to many users. Also, users who want to purchase a suite from one vendor will be impressed with Fabric.
• Reporting has been enhanced. Data from Servicenet, the BPM product, or the firm’s traditional “Manager” product can be fed into a multidimensional star schema format.
• webMethods has improved its core JMS engine. Performance has increased by 12 times according to the firm (no independent benchmarks are available yet). Also, there have been improvements in portal development, with a component-based development model. The company has already moved to Eclipse-compliant tools, where that is applicable, which also helps corporate developers.
Competitive Concerns
• The analyst mode is only for the webMethods Modeler and doesn’t include the firm’s “Workflow” product, which handles human workflow. webMethods has been moving Modeler closer to Workflow, but they are still two separate offerings in the Fabric suite. Competitors, particularly in the BPM space, will likely point to the fact that human and system-to-system workflow are not separate entities in their products.
• Despite “analyst mode,” it is likely that business analysts will require extensive collaboration with IT staff to build a process. It is difficult to build a process without knowing what Web Services are actually available and/or are feasible to build, and what kind of information can be exposed from various sources through other means. webMethods faces the same problem as BPM, and BAM vendors in that development of processes and “composite” applications is a highly collaborative project at best, and is impractical to leave in the hands of non-technical business analysts.
• webMethods is mixing EAI “plumbing” and traditional IT systems management type of functions (Servicenet) with higher level BPM/BAM development functions in the same suite. These functions are aimed at different buying constituencies, making selling an all-in-one suite problematic. While there is some cross-over in how this is surfaced (e.g., a business analyst or LOB manager may want to make sure a specific Web Service is running), even the monitoring and task-oriented portions of these products are aimed at different users. In other words, Fabric’s broad reach could be a weakness, because organizations are simply not structured in an “SOA” friendly way yet, at least in terms of how products are bought.
• webMethods has indicated that much of the new selling efforts around Fabric will concentrate on vertical or horizontal suites, but it hasn’t yet debuted these new solutions. Also, while these suites are a sensible way to reach new markets, the adoption of the underlying Fabric foundation still requires buy-in from different segments of IT as well as those building value-added composite applications.
• Servicenet, once a clear differentiator, is less so now. BEA, HP, and recently Oracle (through its purchase of Oblix), have all entered or will enter this market. Also, it is unclear how much Servicenet will be sold as an independent product to systems management IT staff or how much it will be sold to facilitate business level solutions.
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Recommended Actions
Recommended Vendor Actions
• webMethods doesn’t have the market position to change how organizations buy products and divide functionality (e.g., management, integration, business level development, etc.), even in the new world of SOAs. It should therefore make it easy to substitute out elements of Fabric through strong standards support (e.g., JSR 168, Eclipse, etc.) and alliances with third parties. It should emphasize this capability.
• The company should lead its pitch with business level solutions that solve specific vertical or horizontal problems (e.g., compliance, vertical B2B issues, etc.) in a process-oriented way with strong BAM functionality.
• Correspondingly, a premium should be put on surfacing Servicenet and Manager functionality into dashboards that can be used by line of business managers and others and that feed into overall business level metrics.
• The company may want to preserve an “IT suite” for those solving pure infrastructure problems or management problems related to SOAs and integration.
• Workflow should be fully merged with Modeler, including a common “analyst mode” interface. Also, the company should debut formal collaboration type tools between IT and business analysts, so the back and forth between these two parts of an organization can be streamlined. UDDI 3.0 should be fully supported in Servicenet.
Recommended Competitor Actions
• Competitors in the integration/BAM/BPM space (e.g., IBM, TIBCO, BEA, SeeBeyond, Oracle, SAP, etc.) should continue to closely link their products, including common interfaces and automatic feeding of process and integration metrics into BAM dashboards as well as databases for reporting. At this time, a one “sku” product with all these elements is a possibility, depending on how much traction webMethods and others get from this approach.
• A common task-oriented portal for business users and IT users is also recommended.
• Integration competitors should consider some level of SOA management (including management of services built on other platforms), as this fills in an infrastructure element.
• Competitors in the integration/BPM space should build in analyst interfaces for development, but should include collaboration tools, as these analysts will still have to closely cooperate with technical IT staff in order to build a feasible process model.
• Competitors should include non Web Services or user definable services in SOA management.
Recommended End User / Customer Actions
• Customers looking for traditional integration type functionality for infrastructure projects should continue to consider webMethods, but should get a roadmap on where the company plans to take this product and what type of standards it will support (e.g., ws-x, JBI, etc.).
• End users who are on a path to build service oriented architectures (SOAs) should consider SOA management as a vital part of this plan.
• End users who are looking for applications to solve critical business problems should consider Fabric and its BPM/BAM functionality as these will be more flexible and more “monitor-able” than traditional applications.
• End users, however, should get more information on webMethods’ horizontal and vertical solution suites that may target their particular vertical or business problems.
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