SAN FRANCISCO — BEA Systems on Tuesday introduced Genesis, a business application platform that it claims will “mash up” the best elements of service-oriented architecture (SOA)
CEO Alfred Chuang told BEAWorld attendees during his keynote here today that the “era of innovation with packaged enterprise applications is over.”
Customization takes too long, he said, and leaves customers unable to adjust their IT systems in real time to meet the changing business conditions and unprecedented demand for personalized data made possible by Web 2.0 technologies.
“Genesis radically simplifies next-generation SOA applications, enabling people to build applications that fit how they actually work,” he said. “User-driven applications will be everywhere. Genesis realigns the entire application landscape. It will include user-based pricing and monitoring built into the architecture to make it truly deployable. It’s architected to last.”
Chuang said Genesis extends the vision of BEA’s AquaLogic family by including a simplified approach for assembling and modifying business applications throughout the enterprise. Both end users and IT managers will be able to assemble, change and deploy business applications using new software tools and software-management processes designed to dramatically reduce, if not completely eliminate, the tiresome and costly task of writing new software code.
BEA’s WorkSpace 360 is the development environment for Genesis, which Chuang said incorporates the interests and demands of business and IT workers to create what he calls a “mashup environment” for the development, implementation and fine-tuning of enterprise software applications.
BEA on Tuesday announced the release of AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0, the first product derived from the company’s WorkSpace 360 project. It will provide shared metadata management and structured workflow processes designed to improve coordination and collaboration across multiple business and IT constituents as they build, manage and deploy applications across the enterprise.
This central repository for sharing and managing metadata includes an inventory of each company’s library of applications and business processes. Embedded governance and control features will ensure all applications are defined, designed and run in alignment with each company’s business goals and objectives.
“This is just one aspect of the infrastructure we are building,” Chuang said. “It’s a very different model. Applications are dynamic and highly personal. This will get you so much closer to the end user and give you the ability to improve productivity and dynamically map data in your enterprise.”
BEA, which was among the first middleware developers to extoll the virtues of SOA, on Aug. 16 reported second-quarter sales of $364.6 million, an increase of 7 percent from the $339.6 million it recorded in the year-ago quarter.
However, licensing revenue dipped 9 percent to $123.1 million, and the company did not provide full GAAP financials for the quarter due to an ongoing internal review of the way it accounted for and disclosed stock option grants to investors.
On Aug. 20, NASDAQ gave BEA a bit of a reprieve when it decided to hold off on its plan to delist the company from the exchange after it failed to file several financial statements while conducting its internal review.
BEA shares moved up 32 cents to $12.72 a share in late Tuesday trading. The stock was trading at around $16 a share this time last year.
The company competes with the likes of IBM , Oracle
and Sun Microsystems
and has been the subject of numerous acquisition rumors in the past year.
