BEA, Intel pact to offer WebLogic on new chip

Ilaina Jonas

NEW YORK: Intel Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. on Sunday said they have formed an

alliance to enable BEA's WebLogic software to operate at peak efficiency on a

new microprocessor the world' No. 1 chip maker is banking will extend its PC

dominance into the high-end server market.

BEA's WebLogic, known as application server software, provides a foundation

on which programmers can build applications, such as those used for electronic

commerce. WebLogic, operates on top of major operating systems, including Unix,

Linux, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris.

Historically, programmers have used Intel-based personal computers and

low-end servers to build programs that were subsequently deployed on high-end

servers with the power to process huge numbers of transactions in seconds and

built by Sun and International Business Machines Corp., among others.

"The issue is almost 100 per cent of development of applications running

on WebLogic was done on Intel and less that 5 per cent of the actual

deployment," Bill Coleman, chief executive of San Jose, California-based

BEA, told Reuters.

Intel has long dominated the world of microprocessors - the engine of

personal computers - with its chips in more than a half a billion PCs worldwide.

But Intel wanted to move into the market for servers, the computers that are at

the heart of the systems companies use to conduct business. First it rolled out

its Xeon processors and is about to go into the very high end of server

processors with its Itanium processors.

Ten years and an estimated $2 billion later, California-based Intel is

releasing it's new Itanium processor, the firm's first chip to use its new IA-64

architecture, which will process data in chunks of 64 bits, rather than the 32

bits that chips like Intel's Pentium III and Xeon handle.

With the Itanium, Intel hopes to extend its dominance from the PC to the

high-end server market, taking on Sun and other server makers that use their own

proprietary chip architecture. Intel is betting the new chip will allow

companies to deploy their applications on Intel-based servers and run them more

cheaply because of the company's ability to mass market Itanium chips and sell

them at lower prices.

"The fact that these processors are now in the performance range of what

you've seen in the traditional proprietary servers, you now get comparable

performance for a third or less the price," said Deborah Conrad, vice

president and general manager of Intel solutions market development.

Between the pricing and the performance, BEA and Intel hope to expand the

market outside of the usual top 1,000 richest companies in the world that have

been able to afford such computing power. For BEA the deal means its WebLogic

products will operate very competitively on the Intel architecture as the chip

giant moves into the mainstream business market and allow BEA to retain its lead

in the application server market.

"The big deal about this is we both get to vastly expand our total

available market," Coleman said. Under the alliance, the two firms will

establish a technology lab used to validate and document the WebLogic's

performance and its ability to work efficiently as demand on the server grows.

Intel and BEA also will jointly train and provide support materials to their

direct sales organizations and through companies that sell each of their

products. They also will work to develop service offerings. The deal also

includes working to optimize WebLogic performance on Intel's lower end server

chip family IA-32.

So far, Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., NCR

Corp., France's Groupe Bull BULP.PA and Unisys Corp. have signed on to support

the WebLogic optimized for the Intel chips, the companies said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.