IBM buys 50-year-old Software AG's enterprise tech units for €2.13B in cash

IBM will buy two of European software industry veteran Software AG's tech platforms for €2.13 billion in cash. Founded in 1969, the German biz made its name producing transactional databases and application integration software for mainframe platforms in the 1970s and 1980s. In April this year, private equity investor Silver …

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue Touch of Death

Any guesses how long before said products and company becomes a drive-by acquisition roadkill on the way side of a dinosaur stamping them into the rocks?

RIP Software AG and its products.

[computing]

Software AG bought webMethods in 2007 and StreamSets last year. They paid around US $0.5 billion for each purchase. Software AG may have overpaid for StreamSets, which had annual revenues of about $30 million when purchased. Now that they are selling both combined for $ 2.3 billion, I guess the majority of the sale value is webMethods.

IBM shares Software AG's desire to grow cloud revenue. But growing the webMethods.io SaaS integration offering may be a challenge. Why? First, many (most?) webMethods customers host their integration software themselves -- in the same cloud or on-prem data centers where their other application VMs live. This architecture is probably better than pumping key transactions to a SaaS cloud only to have them pumped right back. So webMethods.io may struggle to cannibalise its customer-hosted sibling. Also, Dell Boomi has major mindshare with the cloud-first integration people. Poaching *integrated* SaaS implementation customers isn't easy. You can't just move VMs. You need to re-setup system-to-system integrations and migrate data.

So while webMethods.io has potential, IBM would do well to refocus on the non-SaaS parts of webMethods. That's where most value lies.