The Mind Electric takes over WebMethods

The news headline says "WebMethods buys a new direction" but it should have said "The Mind Electric takes over WebMethods". WebMethods has aquired three firms for $32m in cash.

The three firms are DataChannel (firm made a lot of noise in the early days of XML) a portal engine, Dante Group vendor for analyzing and monitoring apps and TheMindElectric (TME)(our favorite webservices company). The interesting aspect of the deal is that Graham Glass takes over as CTO of WebMethods and TME's GAIA framework, now known as WebMethods Fabric, takes over as the stuff that stitches it all together. So in short, from a purely technical point of view, TME has taken over WebMethods!

Graham Glass can now upgrade his ageing Lotus Esprit to a Lamborghini Gallardo; WebMethods gains impeccable technical talent and a vision that screams "federation", "visualization" and "virtualization". It's a good plan, however, somebody has got to upgrade that out-dated WebMethods Developer IDE! (Hope this viewlet "debugging a webservice with Eclipse" gives the folks in charge a clue!).

I reside in the D.C. area so if any of the WebMethods folks need further consultation, give me a buzz!