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Issue 3, 2015 |
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Announcing end-of-life in 2020
For the past 15 years, webMethods Broker has been at the heart of the webMethods suite, providing solid and reliable message delivery for thousands of organizations. However, times are changing, with customers demanding even higher levels of availability and the emergence of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Universal Messaging is now replacing webMethods Broker and Software AG is giving customers five years of notice to allow them to switch at a time convenient for them.
Universal Messaging as a strategic messaging platform
In April 2012, Software AG acquired MyChannels as part of a long term strategy to replace webMethods Broker with a modern, future-proof messaging platform. The product we acquired is Universal Messaging (formerly called Nirvana).
Universal Messaging is Software AG’s strategic messaging platform. It provides significant benefits that our customers have been asking for:
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Active-active clustering
Universal Messaging supports true active-active clustering that provides highly reliable and transparent clustering, without the need for shared storage or third-party clustering software. This makes it much more suitable in environments using virtualization or commodity hardware, or where the downtime during an active-passive failover (typically 1-2 minutes) is unacceptably long.
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Performance
Universal Messaging has been architected from the ground up with performance in mind. It’s advanced memory management and efficient persistent storage mechanisms result in higher message throughputs than are possible with Broker.
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Wide range of clients
Universal Messaging offers a wide range of client libraries that can be used to send/receive messages directly to/from other webMethods products. These include Java®, C++, C#, Python, Objective C (Apple), JavaScript®, Flash®, Microsoft® Silverlight®, as well as interoperable solutions such as JMS, MQ Telemetry transport (MQTT) and Advanced Messaging Protocol (AMQP).
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More transport protocols
Universal Messaging provides a range of transport options to ensure data can be delivered to or from anywhere in your organization’s value chain—whether inside or outside your corporate network.
A smooth migration
For the last three years, we have worked extremely hard to ensure that customers will have as smooth a migration experience as possible from webMethods Broker to Universal Messaging. We've not only validated and certified that the JMS-based messaging works as you would expect, but also have ensured that customers using webMethods Messaging (commonly known as native pub-sub) can switch to Universal Messaging without having to make any manual changes to their Integration Server Flow code or triggers. We’ve even extended the capabilities beyond what was possible with Broker through the introduction of multiple connection support in Integration Server.
webMethods Broker supported until 2020
With the migration path complete and hundreds of customers already transitioning to Universal Messaging, Software AG is now announcing the end-of-life of webMethods Broker. To enable customers to properly plan their transition with a minimum of disruption to their existing upgrade schedule, we are providing a full five years of notice.
webMethods Broker will be fully supported until October 2020, with maintenance ending one year earlier in October 2019. This means that any defects reported in webMethods Broker until October 2019 will be fixed and troubleshooting support and existing fixes will be provided until October 2020.
webMethods Broker end-of-maintenance and end-of-life schedule
Planning your transition
If you are upgrading to webMethods 9.7 or 9.8 and want to stay with webMethods Broker, then that's absolutely fine. You will be fully supported for the entire lifecycle of that release. If you are planning to upgrade to webMethods 9.9 or higher, then you should consider switching to Universal Messaging as part of that upgrade project. You will still have the option of staying with webMethods Broker, as it will be supported with every new release of webMethods up to and including the October 2017 release, but you will then need to switch at or before your following upgrade.
More information
If you have further questions about what the end-of-life of webMethods Broker means for you, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for Broker end-of-life available on Empower (login required). Or contact your local Software AG account team.