Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, has announced it has been named by Gartner to be in the Leaders Quadrant of the recently published Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets.¹ Governance enables companies to automate the management of services throughout their lifecycle, providing increased visibility, improved compliance, and greater control of their entire service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Within SOA initiatives, governance is essential, facilitating companies' rapid development of composite applications and effective management of business processes. With SOA adoption, the ease of use, flexibility, and scalability of Software AG's SOA governance solution is what customers' desire, the company says. The role of SOA governance has expanded among Software AG customers as 55 percent reported that Business Process Management (BPM) is a key driver for SOA governance.²

"Clearly, forward-looking, growth-focused companies understand the importance of SOA governance," said Dr. Peter Kürpick, chief product officer and member of the Executive Board. "Our customer experience has shown that SOA governance is not just a key enabler for sustainable SOA adoption, but also a fundamental component of extracting maximum value from SOA and BPM investments."

The foundation for Software AG's solution for SOA governance is CentraSite, one of the industry's most comprehensive platforms for managing IT assets such as services, processes, and data across their lifecycles. By automating governance processes, including quality assurance, consumer on-boarding, and change management, CentraSite makes project adoption easier and consistent with architectural standards, helping accelerate SOA deployment across the enterprise. Gartner stated that SOA governance involves "ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality."

"We take pride in our ability to deliver leading-edge technology and appreciate the recognition given to us by Gartner in placing Software AG as a ‘Leader' within the integrated SOA governance technology sets market," Kürpick said. "We are also committed to expanding our already robust governance capabilities."

That commitment materialized in recent months with the launch of CentraSite ActiveSOA and webMethods Insight. CentraSite ActiveSOA is designed to accelerate and amplify the ROI achieved by SOA. By adopting CentraSite ActiveSOA, enterprises can reduce development time and costs, minimize administration, and improve time-to-market and IT responsiveness. CentraSite ActiveSOA has also strengthened its value as an integral solution to BPM initiatives through its bi-directional interoperability with webMethods BPMS and other third-party BPM tools, making it easier for SOA and BPM stakeholders to discover, define, and manage their service and process assets.

webMethods Insight solves a critical challenge for companies: the need for SOA stakeholders to establish transparency and accountability over their distributed heterogeneous SOA environment for optimal performance and reliability. By providing automated, run-time governance within heterogeneous SOA environments, webMethods Insight provides deep visibility for discovering services, processes, patterns and dependencies, the company says. In addition, the solution offers smart monitoring of services and their SLAs, and rapid root-cause analysis to minimize disruptions. Out-of-the-box integration with CentraSite means that service management can be controlled across the entire SOA lifecycle from one single system of record.

"Our advances in the market speak to the ease of use, flexibility and scalability of our SOA governance solutions," Kürpick added. "Not only can we help customers build a solid foundation for their SOA deployment, we can also drive and scale with the scope and maturity of SOA adoption."

Complimentary copies of this report are available at http://www.softwareag.com/recognition.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is a research tool and a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors' measure against criteria for that marketplace as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission.

Software AG

Software AG is the world's largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Its 4,000 global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by modernizing, integrating and automating their IT systems and processes. As a result, they rapidly build measurable business value and meet changing business demands. Based on its solutions, organizations are able to liberate and govern their data, systems, applications, processes and services - achieving new levels of business flexibility. Its leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining its technology with industry expertise and best practices experience, its customers improve and differentiate their businesses - faster. Software AG has 40 years of global IT experience and over 3,600 employees serving customers in 70 countries. The company is headquartered in Germany and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (TecDAX, ISIN DE 0003304002 / SOW). Software AG posted total revenues of nearly $961 million in 2008.

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1 Gartner, Inc. "Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets" by L. Frank Kenney et al, March 31, 2009.

2 Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey, Software AG (Summer 2008)