Determined to keep one of its oldest products from going stale, BEA Systems Monday refreshed its Tuxedo transaction processing platform, giving it Web services capabilities.
George Gould, Director of Tuxedo Product Marketing, said although this is
officially BEA Tuxedo 8.1, the platform is just as important as the
original
8 release from 18 months ago because of its tighter integration with
BEA’s
mainstay WebLogic Server and BEA WebLogic Workshop platforms, and new
commitment to Web services.
BEA Tuxedo is the backbone behind many of the technologies that people
use
on a daily basis, including phone calls, credit card transactions;
package
shipping and ticket purchases. Fund transfers between banks are also a
common usage of Tuxedo. All of these, Gould declared, are now revealed
as
Web services. Gould said Federal Express uses Tuxedo as its core
transaction
platform, processing some 150 million credit card transactions per day.
E*TRADE and Visa also use it, albeit to a lesser degree.
The new integration allows for improved Tuxedo administration and
maintenance, such as new support for single sign-on and centralized
authentication administration.
“We made the upgrades because customers asked for increased stability,”
Gould said. “We’ve improved security administration, and added an
abstraction layer to the processing. Tuxedo takes care of a lot of the
heavy-lifting in the transaction process to preserve data integration.”
Sharon Ballard, analyst in the Telecom Software Strategies practice at
research firm Yankee Group, said the additions to Tuxedo will make the
product a nice upsell to service provider customers — old and new.
“The mantra among service providers this past year is to make the most
of
the network infrastructure they have,” Ballard said. “Service providers
will
be able to leverage Tuxedo for their legacy systems — they won’t have
to
rip and replace.”
Gould also said BEA added globalization features to Tuxedo, which is to
say
it now enables more language translations from keyboard to transaction
processes. While the United States keyboards recognize Unicode
languages. Tuxedo can now handle several different code sets, Gould
said.
Born some 20 years ago in Bell Labs, Tuxedo was designed by AT&T for
phone
switching networks. It was later bought by Novell, who in turn sold it
to
BEA in 1996. Since that time, the product has become successful for San
Jose, Calif. infrastructure software maker.
The product is well known for its ability to read many programming
languages, including C
different
languages.
BEA’s Tuxedo Fitted with Web Services
