BEA claims SOA leadership

SANTA CLARA, Calif.: Taking its fight in the enterprise infrastructure software space to the next level, BEA chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang at the BEAWorld conference on Tuesday 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. Slated to be available in Q4 2005, the product links the WebLogic Server application server to a version of the JRockit Java Virtual Machine.

“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 company's vice president of marketing Bill Roth further 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.