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Despite initial enthusiasm for service-oriented architecture having since faded, middleware vendor Software AG is still a major proponent of the design methodology

In 2005 and 2006, the enterprise IT industry was obsessed with service-oriented architecture in a way that closely resembles today’s fascination with cloud computing. Inevitably, though, there was rather more talk than action, and fewer organisations operate “an SOA” today than many were then predicting.

But proponents still remain, and they argue that SOA is a design principle – whereby application functionality is splintered into reusable ‘services’ – rather than a particular set of technologies, and as such is as relevant as it ever was. Middleware vendor Software AG is one such example.

“Five years ago people were talking about web services and how to potentially make them scalable for performance,” asserts Dr Peter Kürpick, the German vendor’s chief product officer. “But we have always said that SOA is a paradigm – it’s a way of doing things.”

Still, a vendor has to sell something. Software AG’s approach to selling its SOA governance tools – systems that monitor and enforce the development practices associated with SOA, such as code reuse – is to pitch SOA as an enabler for business process management.

This new emphasis became apparent last summer when it acquired IDS Scheer, a company regarded as the inventor of modern-day BPM, in a deal worth approximately e487 million.

The acquisition brought with it the ARIS BPM modelling framework and access to new European markets – two assets that Kürpick views as important to Software AG’s growth. “The name of the game is really around properties,” he says, “and not so much anymore around pure-play technologies.”

There is plenty of room, however, for SOA principles in cloud computing, Kürpick asserts, as they dictate the way that services delivered from different sources should be integrated and coordinated. “When you are a large corporation that uses Salesforce.com, you need to have integration with [applications such as] SAP or PeopleSoft,” he explains. “We’re seeing SOA being used in that hybrid of on-premise and ‘in-the-cloud’ applications.”

None of the above positioning has done much to dispel one of the longest-running speculations in the IT industry – that Software AG will one day be acquired by compatriot applications vendor SAP. According to some analysts at least, SAP’s NetWeaver SOA platform has yet to deliver the promised potential and Software AG’s SOA expertise and IDS Scheer’s BPM heritage could provide the remedy.

This speculation was revived in June 2010 when Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich told Bloomberg that the two vendors would ‘definitely’ be a good fit, although he added that the Software AG Foundation, which owns around 30% of the company, would only be interested if “the price is excellent, if it fits with the strategy and the timing is good”.

R ‘Ray’ Wang, principal analyst and partner at the Altimeter Group, agrees with Streibich’s assessment. “Software AG makes sense if SAP has determined that they need to augment and align their middleware technologies with what customers are already using,” he told Information Age. “Software AG has good financials and some key technologies.”

Kürpick is rather less forthcoming on the subject. “SAP can acquire whoever they want,” he says, “but at Software AG we have a very stable foundation that would make us safe from any kind of hostile takeover.”