Founded in 1996, webMethods was an early pioneer in the development of web services middleware for business integration, particularly for B2B commerce. More recently, the company evolved toward SOA infrastructure and BAM, and in the past year launched a comprehensive BPM Suite. Today BPM, SOA, Integration, and BAM form the key pillars of the webMethods platform, called Fabric 7.0. webMethods has over 900 employees and operates in 45 locations around the world, including development centers in US and India. In June 2007, the company was acquired by SoftwareAG of Darmstadt, Germany, creating the world’s largest independent provider of business infrastructure software. Following the transaction, SoftwareAG indicated that the webMethods BPMS will be sold and supported as the combined company’s sole BPM offering.
webMethods Fabric 7.0 is a comprehensive business suite that combines BPM and BAM with SOA and integration middleware. The webMethods BPMS offering, represented by the top half of Figure 1, includes a number of Fabric components, architected to layer on top of SOA and integration. The company believes one of its key differentiators is the way in which this architecture truly integrates all of these components from design through implementation rather than offering them as separate components to be integrated at deployment.
