Integration company webMethods has announced the acquisition of Web services tool vendor The Mind Electric (TME). TME founder Graham Glass will become webMethod's new CTO. TME's Glue will be marketed as webMethods Glue and the Gaia product will be named webMethods Fabric. webMethods also acquired portal vendor DataChannel.

TSS readers may remember The Mind Electric being discussed many times on TSS, with Graham Glass personally posting Glue announcements, ever since Glue went into production in Sept, 2001. Congragulations Graham!

Read webMethods to Acquire the Mind Electric(press release).
WebMethods buys a new direction (news.com)
webMethods Acquisitions Round Out Platform (internet world)

Financial details were not disclosed, but perhaps they will when the deal officially closes in a few days.

Hey, how come my piece didn't get mentioned?

http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/the-mind-electric-takes-over-webmethods

also Dave Chappell rings in:

<<a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3873" target="_blank">http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3873</a>>

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3873

Sonic would like to see Graham and webMethods "get on the bus"

and

I run into Graham quite a bit at speaking venues. I had spoken with him about adopting the ESB terminology several months ago. He wasn't too keen on it largely due to at the time that 1)The definition of ESB requires messaging as part of the core requirement. 2) None of the major vendors had gotten "on the bus" so to speak.

Graham, the missing part is here. It has hot deployment to 'snap in' whatever you want and, plupp, finished is your ESB.

-- Andreas

Don't get the logic though, Graham "sold out" just because he didn't subscribe to the vision promoted by Dave Chappel?

Enterprise Software Bus (ESB) is another spin on creating a "fabric" for enterprise wide interconnectivity and interoperability however the "grid" spin is more of enterprise wide resource virtualization.

Oracle and IBM are now heavily spinning the "grid" concept so maybe WebMethods wanted to get on to the bandwagon.

"Hey, how come my piece didn't get mentioned?

http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/the-mind-electric-takes-over-webmethods "

Maybe because you are not news.com or biz.yahoo or internetnews. Nice try though for getting some blog hits.

Dion,

However, my reporting of the news was more revealing.

We now know that Graham Glass isn't going to replace his ageing Lotus. You didn't get that info from the "trusted" sources!

Carlos

Dion,

is Carlos talkin to me?

Bob

Dion,

Sorry about that post, I meant Bob. However, floyd is the original poster, so Bob are you now speaking for floyd?

Carlos

Floyd, I was just unit testing Carlos' sense of humour.
Carlos: You got the green bar!
Dion: Not sure how you got involved in this.
Everybody else: You should code instead of reading this.

hi floyd,

thanks for your words of congratulations. i'm really looking forward to working at webmethods and evolving the web services fabric vision. SOA is of course only just the launchpad for much cooler stuff in the near future ;-)

cheers,
graham

Congratulations from me too. I'm a very happy user of Electric Xml, having used it extensively for almost 2 years.

The question spinning in my head is, will there be a change in the license for both products? Will glue standard edition still exist in future versions? Some of my projects are non profit / small. I don't mind recommending glue pro / enterprise edition if there's a suitable project. And will newer versions of Electric Xml still be free? Electrix Xml is, to me, the easiest xml parser that I have ever used, coupled with an amazingly complete documentation, really improves my productivity when doing xml stuff.

Anyway, congratulations again. I have been following your products development since the voyager days. Happy to see that this time around, things are much better. Congratulations! :)

Good for Gharam and TME. Also an indicator of
the growing profile of web services and SOA.

Looks like we may be hearing something similar
wrt Systinet from one of the other big integration
players (SeeBeyond, Tibco).

Kalyan

I am not so sure that this is good news. Except of course for Graham getting a - deserved - premium for his efforts. There is a definite danger there that a fairly simple and thus beautiful product like glue gets disolved in an unmanageable "mega-suite" like webmethods. It will be interesting to see the direction this is heading...

Karl