BEA Embraces Utility Computing from VERITAS

VERITAS Software and BEA Systems have formed a global strategic alliance that will provide BEA infrastructure software with VERITAS’ utility computing software.

As part of the deal, announced Monday, the companies said they would provide integrated technology and conduct joint development, sales and marketing activities.

San Jose, Calif.’s BEA is the first vendor to openly embrace VERITAS’ utility computing platform, which was created from various infrastructure components accrued from the purchase of a few companies.

Mountain View, Calif.’s VERITAS acquired Precise Software Solutions for its application performance management software provisioning software from its acquisitions of Jareva
Technologies and Ejasent
to form the basis of its utility computing platform, which aims to
provide
customers computing resources on-demand.

Arya Barirani, director of solutions market at VERITAS, said the
companies
chose to work to integrate technology to give customers greater
manageability of application services, increased application
performance and
availability, as well as the ability to adapt to business changes. All
of
these will lower total-cost-of-ownership by requiring fewer servers, he
said.

In the key component of the agreement, VERITAS’ OpForce dynamic
provisioning
software and BEA’s WebLogic platform will be integrated to help manage
multiple WebLogic servers.

VERITAS Indepth for J2EE — WebLogic Server Weblogic will be offered as
a
combination of BEA’s Tuxedo java virtual machine with
VERITAS
Indepth J2EE application performance management software.

Lastly, VERITAS High Availability, a hybrid of VERITAS Cluster Server
and
WebLogic Server, will ensure that applications are highly available.

VERITAS Indepth for J2EE is available now with pricing starting at
$4,000
while VERITAS Cluster Server with BEA WebLogic Server is available
starting
at $2,995. The VERITAS OpForce/BEA’s WebLogic Server will be available
in
the second half of 2004 and pricing will be set then.

Barirani said now is as good a time as any to embark on the
partnership, the
first of its kind for VERITAS and BEA, because customers are bringing
more
applications onto their network, including customer relationship
management
(CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP)
software.

Blade center environments are another area sparking interest in utility
computing; customers will need speedy applications servers from
BEA’s
WebLogic environment to power them, he said.

“This is making an interesting inflection point for a utility computing
solution between VERITAS and BEA,” Barirani told
internetnews.com.

The deal highlights BEA’s embrace of service-oriented architectures
for enabling Web services to conduct business over the
Web, a
space that it will compete in with IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft,
along with anyone else looking to provide SOAs, which are models that
describe distributed computing.

The deal is also a bond between two companies working to fend off
shared
competitors. IBM, for example, competes with BEA on the middleware
front —
applications servers and such — while VERITAS competes with IBM for
offering a complete utility computing strategy (IBM calls its strategy
e-business on-demand).