Interview: webMethods CEO eyes Web services innovation

Integration vendors such as webMethods are constantly attempting to simplify application integration technologies. According to Philip Merrick, chairman and CEO at webMethods, the next round of innovation in the integration space will come from leveraging Web services standards to improve workflow and business processes.

At the same time, Merrick argues that U.S. companies should not discount the engineering talent available in countries like Australia. After speaking in November at the ANZA Technology Network conference in Silicon Valley for Australian and New Zealand companies attempting to break into the U.S. market, Merrick sat down with fellow Australian Mark Jones, InfoWorld's executive news editor, to discuss the future of the integration business.

InfoWorld: What areas of innovation are webMethods focused on right now?

Merrick: We see a couple of things happening. No. 1, companies want to move their entire software architectures to SOA (services-oriented architecture), built from the ground up on Web services. And it’s really difficult to get there by just stitching together application servers and integration servers and a Web services management solution from some small startup down the road. We think there’s a very large opportunity to provide a complete infrastructure product designed from the ground up. We’re doing that with a product we call webMethods Fabric. It’s based on technology that we recently acquired from a very innovative Web services company called The Mind Electric.

Secondly, there’s a whole other layer to deal with, what I call the semantic integration problem. Web services are great but they standardize pure connectivity between applications. The applications still have highly varied data models, extremely different ideas of what business processes should look like. Yet for most large organizations, a business process is going to span many applications. So you’re always going to need in the middleware stack something that can do wrapping, transformation, and, more than that, can actually keep the model of how the business processes are implemented across all of the infrastructure pieces.So [you need] something that’s technology-neutral underneath, like our Fabric product, and then on top have the ability to orchestrate business processes across all of these nodes in the fabric. Our customers now want to get real-time intelligence about what’s happening with the business and with the business processes, and they want to see it in dashboards, they want alerts. So we can put real-time monitoring around [IT infrastructure] at the business process level.

InfoWorld: BI, enterprise application vendors, and other integration players are already working on this problem. How is webMethods different?

Merrick: The winner is going to be the one who can provide the most comprehensive set of solutions to the customer in the shortest amount of time with the greatest assurance of success and lowest cost of ownership and best return on investment. We’re really in a unique position. We have Fabric, we have the ability to have a pure SOA, our ability to bring everything we do in integration on top of that, and our ability to deliver some pretty interesting business activity monitoring technology that [our competitors] don’t have. We’re also able to offer enterprise event management, [injecting] business events into some kind of AI [artificial intelligence]-based rules engine.

InfoWorld: How does the utility computing model figure into your plans?