IBM Bolsters Data and App Integration with webMethods, StreamSets Acquisitions
July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops are among the customers that could benefit from IBM’s completion of its acquisition of webMethods and StreamSets, which it announced last week.
In mid-December, IBM announced an agreement had been reached with Software AG and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owned a majority of Software AG, to acquire webMethods and StreamSets for €2.13 billion, or $2.32 billion per the conversation rate at the time.
The two deals significantly bolster IBM offerings in the fields of data and application integration, which are areas of growing concern due to the rising popularity of artificial intelligence and the need to feed AI models with up-to-date and high-quality data.
The integration of webMethods nets Big Blue one of the top web-based application integration platforms in the market. webMethods, which was founded by a husband-and-wife team in Virginia in 1996, was one of the first B2B software vendors to embrace HTTP-based web services based on XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in the early 2000s.
webMethods went public during in early 2000, the fever days of dot-com mania, and it eventually was valued at $7 billion, which enabled the company to acquire a number of other B2B integration firms. While the company survived the dot-com bust, it never regained its previous valuation and the company was acquired by Software AG in 2007 for about $550 million.
StreamSets, meanwhile, focuses on managing the ingestion of real-time streaming data, such as the data flowing through Apache Kafka. The San Francisco-based company has billed itself as an “air traffic controller” for managing streaming data pipelines, which have proliferated into the millions at some Kafka users.
IBM has big plans for both companies’ products. WebMethods’ primary product today is its iPaaS (integration platform as a service) offering, which provides application integration, an API gateway, and managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities. IBM says it plans to add support for IBM integration products in the webMethods iPaaS, “giving current customers a path to multi-cloud hybrid integration.”
StreamSets’ streaming data management offering will be used in a couple of parts of IBM’s product portfolio. It will find a new home as a premium in IBM watsonx, its AI and data platform, IBM said. But it will also be used in IBM’s Data Fabric and data integration offering, such as DataStage and Databand.
“With the acquisition of StreamSets, our aim is to simplify how organizations approach streaming data use cases,” wrote IBMer Scott Brokaw in a July 1 blog post. “The goal is to enable continuous, real-time processing, integration and transfer of data when it is available, reducing latency and data staleness.”
The StreamSets products is currently offered on Google Cloud, and IBM says it will soon be available on AWS and Microsoft Azure as well.
The IBM i server is home to large amounts of critical enterprise applications and data, and its likely IBM will bring the capabilities of both webMethods and StreamSets to the platform. There is already documentation showing webMethods has worked with IBM i in the past. While the StreamSets documentation doesn’t show native connectors for IBM i or Db2, the IBM i platform’s embrace of open standards, including Apache Kafka, suggests that could be remedied.
