School of Computer Science spin-out company provides Fabric solution

Date: October 25 2006

Cerebra, a spin out company from the School of Computer Science, was recently acquired by webMethods, a leading provider of business integration technologies to some of the world's largest corporations and government agencies.

As organisations strive to achieve rapid business process improvements there is a growing realisation that there is a price to pay for this increased level of flexibility and reuse of existing assets. That price is complexity. Simply keeping track of all the assets that are relevant and available for the construction of a new business process is a challenge. Understanding what these assets do and how they interact remains largely unaddressed.

Cerebra is a pioneer and recognized market leader in the use of standards-based, semantic technology for metadata management. Cerebra's solution automates the integration and organization of IT metadata from any source.

Metadata has long since been identified as a critical building block for any solution, but metadata alone does little to address the issue of complexity and in many cases accentuates it.

The key lies with semantic technology and its ability to allow flexible and dynamic integration of metadata.

Once embedded in the next release of webMethods flagship product Fabric, the Cerebra solution will enable customers to have greater insight into the opportunities for continuous business process improvement.

Professor Ian Horrocks said, "It is very encouraging to see that knowledge representation technology, first developed at Manchester and later by Cerebra, is now sufficiently mature that Web Methods has the confidence to make it a key component of one of their flagship products. As well as being a vindication of Cerebra's contribution in developing and "hardening" the technology, it should also encourage interest in and deployment of this technology in a wide range of application areas."

 

For further information:

For more information on the School of Computer Science’s spin-out companies please visit:http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/business/spinout/

For more information about webMethods please visit: http://www.webmethods.com/