BEA Systems took a step in its evolution as
a pure service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor today, tucking its Tuxedo,
WebLogic and AquaLogic product lines under a new umbrella it calls SOA 360.
Like all SOA
match software with business processes to help customers save money on
software development and integration.
The SOA 360 platform, which BEA is touting at its BEAWorld event in San
Francisco this week, is supported by BEA’s microservice architecture (MSA).
BEA said in a statement MSA combines the tenets of SOA
the concept of a service network, or a modular and lightweight separation of
concerns instead of point-to-point integration.
MSA is driven by events in a business process, using notification services
to publish and discover components or services.
MSA will also work with open source containers and presentation services, a
continuation of BEA’s blended strategy for combining commercial and open
source technologies.
SOA 360 is supported by BEA’s new SOA tooling environment, BEA WorkSpace
360, which is designed to allow business analysts, architects, developers
and IT professionals to collaborate on software creation.
BEA said it expects WorkSpace 360 to roll out throughout 2007.
In a multi-billion-dollar SOA market that includes giants IBM , Microsoft
, Oracle
and Sun Microsystems
, BEA said SOA 360
is a “competitive weapon that will enable the company to deliver innovation
that can adapt faster and more flexibly to changing business conditions.”
But with SOA software already a fixture in the portfolios of many leading
software vendors, most experts agree the new challenge is refining them and
adding new levels of granularity.
This basically means perfecting the software services to do more of what
customers need them to do, including facilitating Web services
As one of the last remaining, large independent SOA players with this focus,
BEA hopes SOA 360 will help the company turn the corner in the SOA arms
race.
To support SOA 360, BEA today announced the BEA SOA for Executives, a suite
of SOA consulting and education services for senior IT executives, and the
Guardian Support Service, an automated maintenance tool that scans, analyzes
and diagnoses networks for potential problems.
BEA also released AquaLogic Enterprise Repository (ALER) 2.5, a re-branded
product culled from the integration of BEA’s acquisition of Flashline and its metadata repository.
The software tracks and analyzes SOAs to give customers a better idea of how
their software services are behaving.
BEA also upgraded AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5 to better
support Web services and reporting tools with a native engine to both XQuery
and SQL.
ALDSP now supports Microsoft Excel to bring live data to users via Web
services within Excel from multiple data sources.
BEA Takes SOA For a ‘360’ Spin
