The news of the acquisition brought on some mixed feelings at the WM Users forum. Understandably so, with every merger the pessimistic techie within us questions what product is going to get dropped. For example, when news surfaced that Adobe was to buy Macromedia, the focus became Photoshop vs Fireworks, Dreamweaver vs Go Live. With the shipment of CS3, no product was dropped, thus the best possible outcome for consumers in the short term.

So I had a look at the product line of Software AG, being a webMethods user myself. I can honestly say that things do look quite rosy, there's not much there in terms of overlapping products. ApplinX seems to be in a similar space to Integration Server, and Tamino as a complimentary product to the Broker.

I'm happy that it was another "medium" sized company that bought webMethods, rather than an Oracle or an IBM. Had that been the case I think that there would be more reason for concern - as history has plenty of such cases (Baan,? JDEdwards?).

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