BEA Fits Tuxedo With SOA Makeover

BEA Systems is giving its Tuxedo transaction processing platform a new fitting and jazzing up the software with a more slick look and

feel based on service-oriented architecture .

Lorenzo Cremona, director of marketing for Tuxedo, said Tuxedo 9.0 is

designed to help customers build new and repurpose legacy applications and

extend them to a SOA distributed computing environment.

“For developers, we’re providing the ability to integrate the two sides of

the IT house,” Cremona said. “On one hand you have all the new development

on Java and .NET environments and on the other you have the legacy

applications.”

“Tuxedo has the ability to integrate the legacy apps into mainstream

languages. We think that developers are receptive to that idea because it

changes their whole migration strategy.”

Cremona said Tuxedo 9.0 boasts better support for XML, which lends it more

punch for SOAs, as well as tighter integration with WebLogic Server and

BEA’s AquaLogic Service Bus for Web services .

Tuxedo is a popular software program that processes transactions for

communications networks, ATMs and credit card purchases. The software,

designed to run applications based on C, COBOL, C++ and CORBA C++ languages that run more than

5,000 transactions per second, was created by AT&T Bell Labs in 1983 to

support that phone giant’s network.

BEA acquired Tuxedo from Novell in the mid-’90s and turned it into its top

transaction processing platform, gaining 2,000 customers in

telecommunications, retail and finance fields by 2000. Tuxedo has proven to

be a great revenue stream for BEA, which went on to create a leading

application platform, called WebLogic.

A new Tuxedo service metadata repository offers application developers and

administrators the ability to store

services parameter information on any Tuxedo application services.

Cremona said 9.0 is more secure, supporting Kerberos for single-single sign

on (SSO), and CERT-C Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) support for digital

signatures.

BEA Tuxedo 9.0 is available now. Those interested may contact BEA for more details.

The new iteration comes as BEA is overhauling its software portfolio, making

the middleware services more flexible to be transferred across the Web on

the fly regardless of the different types of computing gear involved.

BEA has good reason to upgrade its software. Foes IBM and Microsoft are

doing the same and most software makers are aching for a large chunk of what

IDC recently said will be a $15 billion Web services market by 2009.