BEA Makes Fervent SOA Pitch

BEA Systems is intent on improving its ability to offer service-oriented
architecture (SOA), and the company stayed on message at its BEA World 2005
event in Santa Clara, Calif.

The company kicked its Think Liquid SOA strategy up a notch
Tuesday, unveiling new products, partners and programs to lure customers to
its distributed computing approach.

The San Jose, Calif., middleware maker debuted BEA WebLogic Real Time
edition, promising customers instant responses to business applications
running on the WebLogic software line.

Speed of response to queries is something BEA and rivals like IBM, Microsoft
and Oracle have been working on ever since they launched their first
application servers to run anything from Word documents to e-mail clients.

But instant responses are even more important now because business customers
want to use software that facilitates communication across disparate
applications on the Internet. These so-called Web services
are generally a part of broader distributed computing
forays called SOAs.

Getting application responses without delay — or in real time — has been
something of a Holy Grail, as IT engineers contend with bandwidth constraints,
CPU limits and other technological barriers. BEA hopes to shatter that
barrier with the WebLogic Real Time product.

BEA also unveiled a Global Management Alliance to simplify management,
improve operations and reduce downtime of applications based on BEA’s
WebLogic Server 9.0. Partners for this endeavor include BMC Software,
Computer Associates, HP, Mercury Interactive, Motive, Quest
Software, Symantec and Wily Technology.

Following up on an earlier promise
to support more open source platforms, company officials today delivered a
J2EE application environment to support Apache Beehive, Apache XMLBeans and
the Eclipse Web Tools Platform.

BEA also announced support for the Spring framework and certified it for
WebLogic Server.

Overall, the interoperability message stayed the course laid out by BEA
officials in New York at the Think Liquid brand and AquaLogic family line launch
earlier this year.

The central theme is that CEO Alfred Chuang and his team want to free
so-called “frozen” data, which includes data trapped in monolithic silos of
infrastructure from one vendor, allowing products from different vendors to
work together.

The evolution of BEA’s Think Liquid strategy is aimed to meet the challenges
that face the modern SOA.

While Web services standards have matured, application suites are have grown
more sophisticated, making it harder for customers to get different types of
hardware and software to work together, the hallmark of an SOA.

Think Liquid is a philosophy that aims to treat that malady.

Separately at BEA World, BEA rivals JBoss and Microsoft agreed to make
JBoss’ Enterprise Middleware System and Windows Server software work
better together and deepen JBoss support for the Windows Server operating
system.

The rivals will figure out ways to make JBoss work well with Web services
and federated identity services from Microsoft’s Active Directory, the WS-*
Web services architecture, Microsoft Operations Manager and SQL Server.