BEA Systems Monday took
the wraps off of the latest product it feels will differentiate itself from
the competition — BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic.
The San Jose-based application infrastructure software maker developed
Liquid Data to give workers a unified view of disparate enterprise data as
part of a single platform. Using XML
WebLogic provides real-time info access to programs such as customer
self-service portals, customer service and support, and supply chain
applications.
Mark Carges, president of BEA’s Enterprise Framework division, said Liquid
Data provides a standard way for computers to aggregate and expose logical
views of business data inside and outside firewalls, regardless of the
location, format, or type of data source. These needs are especially
prevalent in banks, who need to serve their customers in branch offices,
online and through call centers.
Carges the said the idea for the new product was propelled by the problem of
polling unwieldy data from various resources: Liquid Data, quite simply,
attempts to rein data in. Distributed systems, CargEs said, have become
proprietary data silos, making it cumbersome and costly for businesses to
aggregate real-time info viewing.
“We addressed the problem of ‘How do I send messages to and from packaged
applications from SAP or Siebel?'” Carges said. “There are lots of different
appropriators — legacy and Web applications, databases, integration
adapters, flat files, XML files — and we’ve created Liquid Data to
aggregate them. This is for people who want to get a quick view of what
customer data is available. Developers can craft a logical view from a
unified location, as opposed to pooling application from all over.”
Liquid Data saves time.
“40 percent of the work involved in CRM implementation is to retrieve data,”
Carges said. “Before Liquid Data, a person might build portlet views into
each data silo, and as they were searching for a personal profile, claim or
policy, they’d have to build an aggregate view in their head to find what
they wanted.”
Carges said BEA has solved the cumbersome coding associated with business
applications.
“Let’s say you want to get info from Siebel,” Carges said. “You could write
enterprise application integration code whether you’re using Websphere or
webMethods, grab it and put it together. Someone had to write that
middleware code and that’s hard to do and do it right. And it can’t be
reused.”
Liquid Data is based on XML query,
a language that provides flexible query facilities to extract data from real
and virtual documents on the Web. Analysts, such as IDC Research Director
Michele Rosen, say XQuery, as it’s commonly known, does for XML what SQL
does for databases.
Liquid Data has found placement with one major firm, Cap Gemini Ernst &
Young, who has agreed to training, education and co-marketing activities for
the new product.
The tool costs $25,000 per CPU and is available now as an add-on to WebLogic
products.
What analysts are saying
IDC’s Michele Rosen said she sees BEA’s Liquid Data product as being
especially attractive to developers: the aggregation frees them from the
hassle of designing and building applications that require data from
multiple sources.
Rosen said the tool is part of a growing, albeit nascent niche of
information integration called virtual database technology, where firms are
“creating abstraction layers with a single point of access to manage
heterogeneous applications.”
While the concepts are not entirely new, Rosen said businesses such as BEA
are acknowledging the fact that there are so many different sources.
“They’re doing something about that by moving data into a single warehouse,”
Rosen told internetnews.com.
Rosen said the product is interesting from the standpoint that it
demonstrates BEA’s movement in an arena where it swore it would never go —
the database, even if it is only in virtuality.
“It shows they are trying to expand beyond just being an application server
vendor,” Rosen said. “They’ve come out with a portal server, and integration
server and [Liquid Data] is the latest along those lines. This paves the way
for them to address data in an agnostic, heterogeneous way. This is a good
step forward for them to put a stake in the ground. This represents another
product for BEA to use to diversify its revenue streams.”
Of course, rivals are exploring similar technologies. IBM’s Xperanto project, which
advertises its cause, as it “illustrates how IBM is advancing the state of
integration technology, combining XML and the emerging standard query
language for accessing XML, XQuery, with the power of data integration
across relational databases, XML documents, flat files, spreadsheets, Web
services…” In fact, IBM even offers one of those bank scenarios BEA
alluded to here.
Rosen said Xperanto is based on its DB2 database as opposed to BEA’s
reliance on XQuery.
There are a few pure plays in this space, too, including Excelon, which was recently purchased by Progressive
Software, and X-Aware.
BEA Ships Liquid Data for WebLogic
