BEA Systems , in a bid to entice more ISVs
“SOA in a box,” a kind of kit for building service oriented architectures
The intent is to get ISVs to wrap their specific applications around SOA, a
software architecture that standardizes the way enterprise users access
specific services-based technology, like Web services
Now, officials said, ISVs don’t need to worry about building both an
application and the infrastructure.
“The functional limitations are less than the [WebLogic Platform] Enterprise
Edition but they’re precisely what ISVs need,” said Robert Flanigan, a
spokesman at BEA. “It frees up the research and development cycles
within packaged software application vendors to truly focus on their domain
expertise around their application rather than the underlying
infrastructure.”
As such, BEA tailored its WebLogic Platform Enterprise Edition — a
combination of Server, Workshop, Portal, Integration and JRockit — to meet
the specific needs of its partners’ application.
BEA developers took the business process management, service orchestration,
data mapping and transformation, and process management and monitoring of its WebLogic
Integration, as well as the run-time UI and UI designer elements
of both its WebLogic Portal and Integration, and melded them with full versions of its WebLogic Server,
Workshop and JRockit.
Officials said the WebLogic Platform ISV Edition will cost $17,000 per CPU
compared to the $99,000 per CPU price tag associated with the Enterprise
Edition.
BEA has spent much of 2004 developing and marketing “Liquid
Computing,” its SOA strategy that, when implemented throughout the enterprise, will integrate all the
disparate software applications on top of one standards-based framework.
Part of that strategy is to get ISVs to build their applications with SOA
already included, rather than waiting for the customer to get around to building
in the interoperability. With SOA already in place, value-added resellers
(VARs) and system integrators can market and deploy the specific application
more easily.
BEA shares the SOA market with some heavy hitters in the Java-based
enterprise software department, including fellow middleware giant IBM and Sun Microsystems
. Officials believe they
have an advantage over both of them when dealing with ISVs.
“We don’t have a hardware agenda; we don’t have an application agenda,”
said Bobby Napiltonia, BEA vice president and general manager of worldwide
channels and alliances. “We’re
the integration piece that allows them to focus on their core competencies.”
To offset the relative advantage IBM and Sun have over them in providing
hardware and software applications, BEA has instead partnered with vendors, such
as SAP , HP
and Intel
.
