BEA Offers WebLogic Integration Guidelines To Partners

The move is aimed at promoting BEA's strategy to offer WebLogic Integration as part of a unified software infrastructure on which solution providers can both build and integrate applications for customers.

Branded SteelThreads, the new resources are a series of "cookbooks" that include best practices and architectural guidelines that BEA's professional services group use to provide specific integration functions, said Chet Kapoor, vice president and general manager of WebLogic Integration at BEA.

"Software companies do a good job of describing the ingredients [of a solution] but we don't provide a recipe," Kapoor said. "That's why we have these cookbooks."

For example, one cookbook gives solution providers a blueprint for how to implement customer synchronization between back-end ERP and front-end CRM applications, Kapoor said.

There are two cookbooks available free to solution providers now, and BEA is working on several others that will be released in the future.

In addition to the customer-synchronization guidelines, BEA also offers a cookbook for providing straight-through processing for financial services solutions, Kapoor said.

Kapoor said the guidelines aren't meant to be documents that get lost in a shuffle of partner paperwork, but instead should be one part of an interactive process between BEA and solution providers as they design an integration solution for customers.

"We can put this on CDs or do a mass mailing and it won't mean anything," he said. "What's more meaningful is how do we solve this together in a customer environment. Solution providers themselves have a lot of knowledge as well. [This is about] how do we use both our best practices to solve a problem quicker."

Some BEA partners already had early access to the SteelThreads guidelines, Kapoor said. Wednesday marks a general release of the cookbooks for partners and customers.

Joe Lindsay is CTO of Costa Mesa, Calif.-based solution provider eBuilt, which currently has two active projects implementing WebLogic Integration.

Lindsay said he has found using BEA's best practices helpful, and has leveraged BEA's services group.

Rather than competing with partners, Lindsay said BEA's services arm offers partners support for implementing BEA's product line, as well as expertise in operating system, hardware and networking infrastructure.

Other than that, he said BEA leaves specific customer services to solution providers. "They play the role of architect," Lindsay said of BEA's services group. "Everything above that is what we do. The services folks do not write the custom logic specific to any given customer. That's what they expect their partners to do."

Lindsay also affirmed BEA's strategy--as well as that of competitors IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems--to provide an integrated application development, portal, integration server and tools platform.

BEA's version of that integrated product, WebLogic Enterprise Platform 8.1, will be generally available in August.

BEA has more than 750 customers using WebLogic Integration, as well as global alliances with a several large systems integrators, including Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp. and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, to provide integration solutions using the product.