Software AG Acquires JackBe for Real-Time Visualization

Software AG today continued to reinvent itself via the acquisition of JackBe, a provider of a set of tools for visualizing and analyzing data integrations across multiple processes and events in real time.

According to Mark Herring, senior vice president of product marketing for Software AG, the JackBe application will be offered as a standalone product and in the form of a webMethods Intelligent Business Operations Platform that integrates Presto software from JackBe with the webMethod data integration platform.

The acquisition of JackBe comes on the heels of recent moves to acquire Terracotta, a provider of real-time caching software that Presto already incorporates, and my-Channels, a provider of a real-time middleware platform. The moves followed the acquisition of webMethods in 2007.

With a major shift toward real-time computing taking shape across the enterprise, Software AG is clearly trying to position itself to take advantage of what promises to be a major migration away from all things related to batch processing. But rather than having to make that migration via a set of distinct parts, Herring says Software AG is trying to put in place a complete platform.

Presto, says Herring, will provide the control tower and radar through which enterprise IT organizations will be able to manage all those real-time interactions.

The pace at which this transformation will take place will, of course, vary widely by vertical industry. But as the amount of available processing power continues to expand almost in inverse proportion to the cost of delivering it, chances are high that the shift to real-time computing across the enterprise is about to make a major leap forward.