webMethods Inc. released this product in October 2007, five months after it had been acquired by Software AG, and the judges lauded it for both its functionality and SOA enablement capabilities. Apparently this old EAI dog has lots of SOA tricks to show off.

"I was surprised by how service oriented this product is," said one judge. "You won't get stuck doing point-to-point spaghetti integration with this."

webMethods abstracts protocols from service invocation to allow the loose coupling essential to service orientation. A GUI allows for the automatic creation of service consumer and provider contracts. The company's legacy means that multiples transport and security protocols are supported as well it having more than 100 adapters to packaged and mainframe applications. Yet, inside the runtime container, those adapters function like any other standard Web service.

The products leverages multi-threading for scalability and contains load balancing mechanisms as part of its clustering architecture. The clustering feature also uses a shared repository to hold webMethods state information for use in load balancing and automatic fail-over.

The product can be purchased on either a per-processor or per-project basis. Project rates can vary from $40,000-$100,000 dependent upon their scope.