Software AG Roadmap status update Q1 2012

Me and my colleagues attended the Software AG (SAG) Partner Update event in Brussels a couple of weeks ago and learned about some interesting new tools and features that are coming up. In this blog post I'll try to give a short overview of what was announced.

Let me start with the most surprising announcement and one that has been high on my personal wish list since a long time already: SAG will complete its middleware portfolio with an application platform! The existing webMethods middleware platform has mainly been focused on integration and orchestration of existing business logic until now and didn't contain a component for development and deployment of new business logic. This will change in the future, but exact details on what the application platform will look like were not revealed. I picked up some rumors that the solution will probably exist out of a number of open source components such as Tomcat and Spring, but more details will hopefully be published soon.

Another interesting and hot topic these days is mobile and SAG also has plans in that domain. In version 2.2 of MashZone, dashboards will be available on mobile devices such as iPad, Android,...  The mobile app development platform from Metismo, which was acquired by SAG last year, will be rebranded to webMethods Mobile Designer and will be expanded with new functionality such as Windows Mobile support, updated widget libraries, ...

Cloud can not be missing in any IT-talk these days, so besides the continued integration of the Terracotta distributed cache solution in the whole SAG platform, a new offering was announced called webMethods Cloudstreams. This solution is intended to solve SaaS application integration challenges, such has handling the complex to use SaaS APIs, abstract SaaS providers, provide greater visibility into cloud services, ... Looks like this solution will extend the existing webMethods Mediator solution by providing SaaS service governance, centralized security, SLA enforcement, monitoring dashboards and service mediation interfaces for the cloud.

For existing webMethods customers, SAG is investing in webMethods Command Central, a solution that will lower the TCO of a webMethods landscape from an operational perspective by providing a centralized management solution that allows to administer multiple instances simultaneously, improves configuration, fix/SP installation, provisioning,...

Looks like we'll have plenty of interesting new stuff to play around with the next months and years :-)

Author: Kristof Lievens