IBM goes on spending spree

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Big blue adds SOA specialist Webify's healthcare and insurance strings to its bow and shells out $740 million for MRO

IBM has bought service oriented architecture (SOA) specialist Webify Solutions to beef up its presence in the healthcare and insurance sectors.

The acquisition will help customers in these areas create and deploy applications quickly and easily to respond to changing market demands, according to IBM. Big blue says it will integrate the technology into its WebSphere portfolio with immediate effect.

The move combines IBM's liking of open standards with Webify's semantics expertise, which should, according to the vendor, mean that it can more easily solve sector-specific business issues regardless of the underlying technology used.

Using Webify, IBM Global Services(IGS) will take advantage of a repository of business services to deliver reusable services to specific industries.

"Customers in different industries are solving different business problems. Healthcare companies need to comply with HIPAA regulations while insurance companies are seeking to streamline claims processing," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager of IBM WebSphere Software.

"Webify's industry-specific tools, models and frameworks will complement IBM's industry leading WebSphere software and the deep industry expertise of IBM Global Services to better help insurance and healthcare customers use SOA to solve business problems unique to their industries."

As part of the deal, 120 Webify staff based in the US and India will transfer to IBM's employment.

MRO Software

Maggie Holland
Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.