webMethods Inc. (Nasdaq: WEBM - News), a leading business integration and optimization software company, has introduced webMethods for Compliance as the first in a series of new Business Process Productivity solutions. Additional offerings for the consumer goods, financial services, manufacturing and retail sectors are scheduled to debut later this year.

These new solutions add domain-specific features and embedded support for industry best practices to the extensive capabilities offered by webMethods Fabric(TM) for integrating, assembling and optimizing end-to-end business processes. In doing so, enterprises can employ these solutions to realize continuous process improvements, which is the benchmark for achieving increased Business Process Productivity with greater speed, agility and certainty than previously possible. Employing this approach, a leading manufacturer was able to simultaneously improve on-time fulfillment rates while reducing the number of manually-processed orders -- both by 75% -- by automatically identifying and resolving potential exceptions throughout its order fulfillment process. Likewise, a global banking giant is using these capabilities to manage, monitor and optimize more than 40,000 business rules dynamically applied to 50,000 hourly transactions encompassing 10,000 corporate customers spread across 40 countries using 50 different currencies.

Working with dedicated solution partners and clients, webMethods is building upon this success to develop Business Process Productivity solutions addressing compliance monitoring, payments processing, new product introductions and promotions, demand-driven manufacturing and other strategic requirements. With a focus on speeding deployment and return on investment, these solutions are being developed around a comprehensive set of features, including:

- Personalized user interfaces and reporting dashboards to speed and simplify end-user adoption.

- Predefined business templates, rules, processes and key performance indicators (KPIs) to enhance the immediate business value that these solutions can deliver.

- Documented reference architectures, implementation methodologies, targeted training programs, and user-based business case analysis, provided by webMethods and/or its dedicated solution partners, to help ensure successful implementation of the technology.

Underscoring the speed and reliability in which each solution can be deployed, webMethods documents an average of two projects going into production on any given business day with an average return on investment of just 10 months being reported.

"Our new series of Business Process Productivity solutions extends the value proposition offered by webMethods Fabric with additional resources for more completely addressing a number of unique business requirements – much faster than custom development and with greater precision than traditional packaged applications," said David Mitchell, president and CEO, webMethods Inc. "Through close collaboration with our 1,300 enterprise customers and our global industry partners, we've gained significant insight into the business process issues challenging corporations along with the means to address these issues in a repeatable way to deliver greater efficiency, predictability, and flexibility. As a component of our value-based selling approach, the introduction of these additional solutions for Business

Process Productivity allows us to capitalize on this experience to provide our customers with even higher value returns."

webMethods Fabric offers industry-leading capabilities for business integration, business process management, business activity monitoring, and composite application development within a unified product suite. As such, it provides users with the integrated ability to automate and extend core operations along with the necessary levels of end-to-end visibility needed to continually optimize critical business processes. Through the use of patent- pending 'fingerprinting' technology, it can even help predict, diagnose, and resolve real-time exceptions within ongoing business processes. webMethods is the only vendor to combine all of these features within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which helps enterprises deploy these capabilities much faster than otherwise possible while achieving additional benefits from re- using existing applications as readily invoked Web services.

About webMethods, Inc.

webMethods (Nasdaq: WEBM - News) provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and optimize available IT assets to drive business process productivity. webMethods delivers an innovative, enterprise-class business integration platform that incorporates proven integration technology with next generation capabilities into one interoperable set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency, agility and control.

webMethods combines industry leadership with a zealous commitment to customers to deliver tangible business value to more than 1,300 global customers. webMethods is headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan. More information about the company can be found at http://www.webMethods.com.

The webMethods name and logo are registered trademarks, and webMethods

Fabric is a trademark, of webMethods,Inc. in the United States of America and certain other countries. All other marks mentioned are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies.