BEA helps SIs with SaaS infrastructure

BEA helps SIs with SaaS infrastructure

BEA Systems is committed to capitalize on Service-Oriented Architecture and Software-as-a-Service

Thursday, March 27, 2008

The role of middleware is assuming greater importance with the growing momentum of Service-Oriented Architecture and Software-as-a-Service

One of the leading software players in this space, BEA Systems plans to capitalize on this trend.

BEA Systems' planned next-generation application platform, called Project Genesis, will feature an open source component and is intended to enable quick development of applications without requiring new infrastructure.

It also features tools to enable collaboration, social tagging, and business process management.

Theo Beack, deputy CTO, BEA Systems, spoke to Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News about BEA's efforts in this space and on how it is working with SIs to help them build Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

Could you elaborate on your engagement with SIs in India and worldwide on SaaS?

We are having events to tell companies what BEA is doing in Software-as-a-service.

BEA's Project Genesis is something that spans all our products and we are especially focusing on the SaaS enablement product. We are creating an Open SaaS platform for the industry.

This is why we want to meet global SIs that have the experience of working on it with global customers. The adoption of SaaS as a business model and technology is picking up.

Sis create solutions by taking existing customer applications and turning them into SaaS model or by creating new ones. For this, they need the SaaS-based infrastructure that doesn't really exist in the world today.

We have virtualized technology for metering and billing, security, UI frameworks that make it easy to integrate applications.

Currently a number of companies that port SaaS solutions have to create the entire infrastructure from scratch, which requires a lot of investment.

Our aim is to provide a platform where they can launch the SaaS applications much quicker and invest much less. They only have to leverage our infrastructure.

How do you view the SaaS market? Has it taken off in a big way?

SaaS as a model is being adopted widely all over the world. The principles are the same in different regions.

Many companies recognize the advantages of SaaS: reduced costs and flexibility are compelling factors in many countries. It doesn't take a lot of upfront investment to use the software.

It's a confluence of different things such as adoption of multi-core technology, virtualization, the ability of Internet to connect in a reliable manner. These have led to the acceptance of hosting an application in a cloud and know it is always predictable. It has given confidence in this business model

What are the limitations of the existing application infrastructure?

Most middleware don't have the inherent SaaS infrastructure. They have the initial starting blocks but SIs have to build additional capabilities before they can even create the applications.

This costs time-to-market and more investment. By having a SaaS-enabled platform you have to invest less and time-to-market is accelerated since solutions can be introduced faster than usual.

BEA is not going to host our solutions. Our intent is to provide the software platform on which SaaS solutions can be built and hosted.

How is the SOA space shaping up?

Part of the reason SaaS is coming on its own now is in part because of SOA. A lot of companies can now not only provide the applications as a whole, but also discrete services to business partners. There is a lot of interest because of the experience they have had with SOA.

Are collaboration and social computing also driving SOA in the enterprise?

In Project Genesis, we have the notion of the dynamic business applications. These have several aspects such as infrastructure needed for hosting layer; interaction and user experience.

So the portal is an extension of user experience. Users want to collaborate and create their own applications. The business processes and user experience and portals get some of the data from the infrastructure.

Traditionally, IT teams contribute development time and investment to order to cater to business users. But social computing aspect and rich applications have changed that.

Users want to control and create applications; combine data in new ways and share it with peers. On the business process front, they have the institutional knowledge to manage these processes, create and change them.

SOA is considered as something that the IT team develops. Under Project Genesis, we do a lot of work on the social computing aspects and business process layer to make it intuitive and easy for a business user.

Do enterprises tend to go for an overall SOA strategy or on project-by-project basis?

It's a combination. We have worked with customers for the past five years and there is no single recipe.

Many companies do project-by-project SOA while some do region-by-region basis. At some point they have to connect.

One way in which they connect is with governance tools that manage the lifecycle of processes. The services created for each application then get reused.

One of the common ways in which they get reused is through business process. Enterprise-wide SOA projects are rare because it takes a bigger investment and most CIOs prefer to take a route that is less risky and less upfront funding; they can do incrementally and prove it works with both knowledge and experience, and then grow that success.

That is a more pragmatic approach that is followed in different parts of the world. But I see that especially in Europe and Asia, they prefer to take the incremental route.

Does BEA software allow for business process modeling?

One of our products, AquaLogic Business process management, has been one of our strongest products as far as user adoption goes.

What is interesting is that there are two approaches to SOA. One is the bottom up approach where IT starts the initial approach to solve the problem and the second is the business-related approach where the business division decides to optimize certain aspects of business for more operational efficiency, consistency and then automate the business processes.

©CyberMedia News