Verity Gets DralaSoft: Simpatico or Strange Bedfellows?Verity Gets DralaSoft: Simpatico or Strange Bedfellows?

When search vendor Verity acquired capture vendor Cardiff Software last year, a lot of people were scratching their heads at what seemed like a departure. If they didn't see the fit back then, perhaps their understanding improved with Verity's purchase last month of Dralasoft, a fledgling business process management (BPM) vendor better known among independent software vendors (ISVs) than end users.

Picked up for $8 million in cash, Dralasoft offered J2EE-based workflow, business activity monitoring (BAM) and, more recently, BPEL orchestration software, and it sold to dozens of software developers. One of those customers was Cardiff, which embedded Dralasoft technology as the core workflow engine of its LiquidOffice business process automation (a.k.a., electronic forms) solution.

Verity has more than 260 ISV customers, so with Cardiff and Dralasoft technology, it's fast becoming a one-stop-shop for ECM vendors and other developers requiring content capture, workflow and search components. Verity also plans to better unify its product line. To wit, the company has already rebranded the Dralasoft components as Verity LiquidBPM Engine (workflow), LiquidBPM Studio (for developers), LiquidBPM Manager (for BAM) and LiquidBPM BPEL Orchestrator.

Developers and end-user organizations are also interested in the combination of search and BPM, says Mark Seamans, Verity senior vice president of research and development. "There's a lot of resonance in being able to surface information, such as purchasing records, service information or customer documents, and put that in front of the business process," he says.

Seamans says Verity will soon launch an update of LiquidOffice with an embedded version of K2 for in-process transaction mining.

Dralasoft also sold directly to end-user organizations, but without name recognition or corporate gravitas, customers often balked. Taking advantage of the Verity name, Seamans says the company's 350 Teleform and LiquidOffice resellers can better sell and support Dralasoft's technology among small and medium-sized businesses.