While the joint development, marketing and sales agreement was only announced on March 1, the deal was actually signed before Christmas, ComputerWire has learned, and members of Software AG's design team have been working in Fujitsu's California offices since then. By this summer the companies say they will be ready to unveil the suite of modules. The suite has not yet been given a name.

Taken together, the companies believe that the suite will take them ahead of competing platforms from IBM, BEA, and Tibco, which according to Software AG's Jonathan Airey, vice-president of XML business integration, do not have tight enough linkages between business process management and services-oriented integration.

The companies define SOA as "a standards-based organizational and design methodology for redesigning business systems and applications to more closely align with the functional processes of the organization."