BEA claims SOA leadership

Taking its fight in the enterprise infrastructure software

space to the next level, BEA chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang at the BEAWorld

conference here announced a series of new products and partnerships programs,

which the company claimed would help customers 'think liquid' and accelerate

their service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects from pilot to production.

Chuang also claimed that BEA was the leader in the SOA space.

This is in direct contrast with arch rival IBM's claim that BEA was attempting

to gain "traction" in the space where it was already a leader by a

large margin.

Reports suggest that IBM is expected to announce new SOA

management services later this week to strengthen its control in the SOA space.

"SOA is the most powerful movement in enterprise

technology today," Chuang said adding that BEA was the company making SOA

happen in the real world. Talking to CyberMedia News, BEA executive vice

president for new product strategy Rob Levy said that while SOA was still

defining itself, BEA's technologies were best suited to meet customers'

demand in the space.

"The days of business silos and software smokestacks are

coming to an end, and our customers couldn't be happier," Chuang said

adding that the managers will no longer have to cobble together scraps of

information through dozens of phone calls, requests from corporate databases and

hours of spreadsheet work.

Reiterating BEA's commitment to the SOA space, Chuang also

unveiled its WebLogic Real Time Edition and slated to be available in Q4 2005.

"This product doesn't need to pause to do garbage

collection of software objects," he said, adding that the new version

allows customers to upgrade applications while they're still running on a

network," he said.

The company claims that the real time edition would also help

customers get more predictable performance from their Web sites and

applications, thereby helping them leverage these benefits in an SOA.

Giving a demo of the new product, the company's vice

president, marketing, Bill Roth pointed out that the WebLogic Server has the

zero-downtime capability that enables it to be upgraded with no system downtime.

This can be critical for maintaining transactional applications.

The BEAWorld 2005 also saw BEA reiterating its support for

using open source application frameworks, like Spring, with its middleware. BEA

is providing customer support for Spring as well as certifying Spring for use

with WebLogic Server.

BEA's WebLogic Platform can blend with frameworks including

Apache's Beehive and XMLBeans, Spring, Tomcat, and the Eclipse Web Tools

Platform.

Shubhendu Parth