IBM acquires NRI-owned IT firm

New York: Global IT giant IBM has acquired privately held Webify, founded by Indian American Manoj Saxena.

Although the financial terms have not been disclosed, IBM has said that around 120 employees of Webify working in Texas and Mumbai would become part of IBM, according to the Silicon India magazine.

The Austin, Texas-based Webify's programmes help insurance companies, healthcare companies and banks share data among various software systems that otherwise would not be able to communicate with one another.

It provides hundreds of industry-specific, pre-built standards-based accelerators, tools and frameworks.

With this acquisition, IBM will expand into the fast-growing market of integrating corporate software systems.

The acquisition will help IBM to take advantage of its strengths in business consulting, IT services and software to develop high-value tools that help companies optimise and transform their businesses.

Webify technology will be immediately integrated into IBM Software Group under the WebSphere brand.

"What we see here is the creation of a very large market for service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the next three or four years," Saxena said at a press meet held to announce the acquisition.

The merger will help Webify increase its reach to customers around the world.

"From a shared point of view, Webify and IBM have a very similar point of view," he was quoted as saying.

Saxena will continue to manage Webify and will take on additional responsibilities for IBM's SOA strategy, according to the report.

Prior to this, Saxena was senior vice-president, marketing and business development for Commerce One. He was also founder president and CEO of Exterprise Inc.

Under his leadership, Exterprise grew from a start-up staff of five to over 200 employees within two years and raised investments from Dell Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Triton Ventures, Austin Ventures and Vignette Corporation.

For his accomplishments, Saxena was named "2000 Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inter@ctive Week magazine and awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by Michigan State University in 2001.