I visited Software AG’s headquarters in Darmdstadt, Germany last week, where I got to hear from CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich about the company’s direction. One thing that stood out for me was Streibich calling Software AG a “software project company.” Software AG’s battalion of software, services and products, said Streibich, are what make the company an all-round systems integrator. 
The company’s purchase of IDS Scheer last year has certainly made it more of an end-to-end BPM vendor that is now capable of remaining at the customer’s side from start to finish of the entire BPM project. Hence Streibich now calling Software AG a “software project company.”
(Software AG acquired last year Germany-based IDS Scheer, a vendor of a business process modeling platform and with whom the company had partnered with on customer BPM projects. IDS Scheer would start the BPM project with its ARIS modeling platform and Software AG would complete it with its WebMethods execution engine. But there was not a proper transition between the two phases from a customer perspective.)
While Software AG now offers a comprehensive project offering, it’s not unlike what companies like Oracle Corp. are doing with a single-vendor stack approach. Oracle strives to offer customers a one-stop shop for everything from the metal to the software, hoping that customers will find everything it needs from the red stack. Software AG doesn’t call what it’s offering a stack, but it’s a similar thought process. Yet unlike Oracle, Software AG markets its BPM platform as open—meaning open to other vendor execution engines like those from IBM or Tibco should the customer choose it.
