WebMethods moves into metadata management

Business integration software specialist WebMethods has this week bolstered its business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities by acquiring the assets of privately-held Cerebra, a software firm specialising in semantic metadata management.

WebMethods said Cerebra's technology would provide a federated metadata repository within the vendor's Fabric BPM suite.

Management of metadata - data about data - has emerged as an important element of many firms' SOA and BPM strategies, according to WebMethods. Metadata can help SOA adopters automatically track the interrelationships between different reusable software assets or components.

The company said the new repository would automatically provide users with information about the relationships between different assets - information that can be used to simplify change management and increase asset reuse by making it possible for administrators to search for the best asset for a particular business process.

Marc Breissinger, chief technology officer at WebMethods, said in a statement that the complex and changing nature of current business processes means that many simply break down due to incompatible relationships between different software components.

"When used to enrich a specific process, semantic metadata helps overcome inconsistencies by providing a higher level of agreement to meaning and intent, " he added. "This allows for the richer orchestration of the transactions and interactions that fundamentally define the process. The end result is that semantic metadata enables higher levels of automation, more assured decision-making and greater efficiency throughout the process."