SOAWorld 2007 Gold Sponsor webMethods has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, designed to better connect people, data and diverse systems through enhanced interoperability with Microsoft technology. The organization serves as a collaborative forum for developing and sharing common technology models, facilitates scenario-based testing of multi-vendor solutions, and works to communicate additional best practices to users.

webMethods will be working with Microsoft, the initiator of this collaborative effort, and other key vendors, including BEA Systems, CA, EMC, GXS, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems, to simplify integration and improve interoperability with Microsoft-based solutions. webMethods’ participation in the alliance is driven by the company’s long-term commitment to common standards and shared best practices as a means for overcoming the complexity associated with heterogeneous systems.

“As customers seek to leverage service-oriented architecture to reduce development costs while improving business agility, the need for real-world solutions for achieving more universal interoperability becomes paramount,” said Marc Breissinger, CTO of webMethods.

Breissinger continued:

“We view the Interop Vendor Alliance as an excellent forum for helping to address this goal as it recognizes the widespread influence of Microsoft technology within Global 2000 enterprises. With the wider availability of ‘plug & play’ solutions for complex integration scenarios, enterprises can reduce their total cost of ownership while more readily taking advantage of new innovations and emerging business opportunities.”

“Addressing the complexity inherent within heterogeneous systems is an overriding, day-to-day concern for most IT organizations,” said Tom Robertson, GM of Interoperability and Standards, Microsoft Corporation. “Based on their leadership with many of the underlying technologies and standards for enabling improved interoperability, we’re delighted to have webMethods join our efforts to further reduce IT complexity. Their participation in the Alliance should be viewed as welcome news by joint customers.”

Since the company’s founding, webMethods has provided significant support for a number of major standards bodies and interoperability initiatives. For example, webMethods proposed one of the first standards for service-oriented computing to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 1997, served as principal architect for RosettaNet and is a founding member of the UDDI consortium.

Through its continuing participation in key standards groups, including the W3C, OASIS and the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization, webMethods has aided the development and advancement of key Web services standards such as SOAP 1.2, WS-BPEL 2.0, XML Schema, WSDL 2.0, UDDI, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-Notification and WS-RX. webMethods’ long-term collaboration with Microsoft includes the recent development of the WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Discovery specifications.