The suite life of webMethods and Infravio

As I said a couple of weeks ago, is this a great time to be an SOA vendor, or what? 

Now, webMethods has announced it is acquiring Infravio for a cool $38 million. Infravio is a registry solution provider for SOA and Web services. WebMethods said Infravio's main product, called X-Registry, will be integrated with WebMethods' Fabric server software by the fourth quarter. Until then, X-Registry will be sold on a standalone basis.

The endless summer of SOA acquisitions continues (we have until September 21st, after all) -- in a few months, we saw HP pick up Mercury/Systinet (Infravio's arch competitor), BEA pick up Flashline, an SOA repository provider, and IBM pick up Webify, a provider of Web services and SOA component solutions, mainly in the healthcare and insurance verticals.

"We are only at the third or fourth inning of the SOA Game," says Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards for Infravio. "But it's time for Infravio to join the major leagues."

Fellow ZDNet blogger Dana Gardner says this ongoing buying spree of SOA solutions providers reflects a movement toward the offering of SOA suites, versus attempting to assemble best-of-breed products on one's own. "The fact that more of these products are built with SOA in mind (and of SOA), and with more of their core components and platforms leveraging open source and standards, may mean that it has become less risky to combine products and services."

And, until now, Miko points out, SOAs have been growing organically, as platforms of configurable business services made up of components that have never before been organized, orchestrated, composed, "or otherwise assembled into successful configurations in order to meet greater goals." Time for governance, and time for suite-based products that can handle end-to-end,design time-to-runtime management of these services, he says.