IBM Boosts Integration Functions Of WebSphere With Latest DealIBM Boosts Integration Functions Of WebSphere With Latest Deal

IBM on Thursday disclosed its third recent acquisition designed to boost the integration functions of its WebSphere product line. The company says it's making these investments because of huge demand from customers for integration products, which help them tie together, rather than replace, existing systems.

IBM says the acquisition of 60-person, privately held Holosofx Inc. will help it build on strong growth in the WebSphere integration line, whose revenue grew greater than 100% year over year, despite one of the most difficult IT spending environments in history.

This deal, which has already closed, follows the January acquisition of CrossWorlds Software for business-process integration and the June acquisition of Metamerge for directory integration.

Holosofx brings to IBM business-process modeling and automation tools. In a nutshell, such tools help business analysts define the logic within a business process and perform analytics on their efforts to automate those processes.

The latter functions are performed through a business-process modeling server/monitor that lets analysts track processes and take actions against the results they see to continuously improve business processes.

One example of where the software could be applied is in insurance claims processing. The Holosofx tools would be used to model how the process should work and define the steps that take place. It would let analysts monitor whether the process is operating effectively and how to fine-tune it if appropriate, says Marie Wieck, IBM's VP of WebSphere business-integration development.

Big customers including J.P. Morgan Chase and Toyota use Holosofx software, and IBM was already reselling the Holosofx software. It said the software should also assist companies in complying with industry-specific data-sharing standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in health care and straight-through processing in financial services.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.