IBM has agreed to acquire privately held Webify for an undisclosed sum. 

Webify delivers industry specific building blocks for creating Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) in healthcare and insurance sectors. Its pre-build service components allow enterprises to more quickly create business services.

"[Webify] brings these assets that are very much industry specific assets and that add value to an industry as they start to build these next generation composite applications, and as they start to deal with their industry standards that are making up their industries," IBM's general manager of WebSphere Robert LeBlanc said in a conference call.

Healthcare in the US for instance has to comply with the HIPAA legislation and insurance providers have to meet regulations set by ACORD.

SOA is an architecture to build and maintain applications in an enterprise. Rather than designing applications from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company.

Using XML and standards from the world of web services, SOA will support both Java and .Net, as well as any of the standards-based integration platforms from companies like Oracle and SAP.

The Webify products will be integrated into IBM's Webshpere portfolio of webservices and SOA products.

In addition to the industry specific SOA building blocks, Webify will supply IBM with a governance manager that allows SOAs to meet regulatory requirements.

Webify is a long time partner of IBM. The company also has partnerships with Oracle and BEA. Webify chief executive Manoj Saxena said that the company will continue supporting customers on non-IBM platforms.

The emergence of industry specific applications signals a level of maturatio n for SOA products, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with Zapthink. He added however that there remain to be some gaps in IBM's SOA product offering.

He also cautioned that the acquisition will put IBM in more direct competition with some enterprise application vendors that are long-time partners such as SAP and Oracle.

"IBM has steered clear of that because they have so many partners in the business application space," Bloomberg told vnunet.com.

"As we are seeing less of these Chinese walls between business applications and middleware, it becomes harder for IBM to partner with folks like SAP and Oracle."