Financial terms were not disclosed as IBM announced its acquisition of Webify and its service oriented architecture (SOA) software and services. SOA has been increasing in importance as firms look for ways to make legacy applications available as web services.

IBM has plans to make Webify part of what it can offer to companies through its business consulting services. These services provide richer profit margins to their providers than software sales do in that heavily competitive market.

Webify’s semantic expertise will make it useful when IBM comes calling to recommend a solution in a given vertical market. The Webify semantics will be the bridge to bring proprietary applications to a point where they can communicate with other business processes.

The company has been an IBM partner for a few years, and all of its 120 employees based in Austin and Mumbai, India, will join IBM when the purchase has been completed, the companies said in a statement on the deal.

Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software, emphasized a couple of vertical markets where Webify will help IBM. He mentioned the insurance and healthcare markets, both of which notoriously run proprietary applications and lots of them.

Both markets have plenty of deep-pocketed players that can afford to make the kind of investments in SOA that will make IBM happy they picked up Webify. As long as IBM can assure those industries they can establish and maintain security with SOA, while making those back-end processes more accessible, they should be able to capitalize on this purchase.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.