August 2, 2006
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IBM, the world's largest computer services company, said on Tuesday that it has acquired privately held Web services company Webify Solutions to expand in the fast-growing market of integrating corporate software systems on the Web.
By Reuters
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. IBM said 120 employees of the Web Services company, based in Austin, Texas, will become IBM employees. Webify has operations in Austin and Mumbai, India.
Webify's Web services helps insurers, health care companies and banks, among others, share data among various software systems that otherwise would not be able to communicate with one another, IBM said in a statement.
Sales related to such so-called service-oriented architecture, or SOA, Web systems helped fuel second-quarter growth of 5% in IBM's software business, traditionally the company's most profitable unit.
IBM's approach to SOA "means not going to the customer and asking, 'Do you want another 3 pounds of software?'" said Kristof Kloeckner, vice president of strategy and technology for IBM's software group.
"We are saying, 'What are your business components, which ones are important to you, which are becoming an impediment to conducting your business?" Kloeckner said. "This is really about making services repeatable and to a degree predictable."
IBM, based in Armonk, NY, has made about 40 acquisitions in the past three years, including $2.02 billion of purchases last year.
Of last year's 16 acquisitions, 10 were in software, IBM said. The company has said it sees additional acquisitions in software and services, two areas it considers the most profitable.
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