This Time, It’s Personal for BEA’s WebLogic Servers

BEA is hoping that the solution providers will seize on the latest versions of its WebLogic Commerce Server and Personalization Server as out-of-the-box tools for bringing a more personal touch to their customers' e-commerce sites.

The new versions of BEA's flagship products add features intended to take the load for creating e-commerce backend applications from the solution provider. Among these new functions is the ability to create a unified user profile on the fly when the application accesses new or pre-existing sources of customer information, allowing e-businesses to deliver personalized content.

"The ability to do personalization will be critical to keeping customers coming back," says Gail Ennis, vice president of marketing for BEA's E-Commerce Applications Division. "Dot-coms used to spend $300 to attract customers to a site, and doing that means profitability is never in the picture. Personalization enables e-businesses to establish a preferred relationship with the customer the way a brick-and-mortar company might."

This ability isn't lost on BEA's solution provider customers. "Personalization is now being seen as a core function of e-commerce," said Jamie Lerner, chief technology officer at Xuma, which uses BEA's WebLogic servers. "

Lerner says that the concept has evolved into three approaches to personalization: rules based, collaborative filtering and inference based.

"Rules-based personalization is easy," he says. "Anytime anyone orders something to drink, you offer them glasses. There's a direct connection between the products. Collaborative filtering is based on connections between what people do, like Amazon.com's suggestions of other books bought by people who bought the book you're looking at."

Inference-based collaboration requires a more complex set of algorithms. "Essentially, the system is learning by analyzing the data to pull out trends," says Lerner. "The new versions of the BEA servers are exciting to us because they add this out-of-the-box analysis functionality."

The servers include pre-integrated commerce pipeline components, which allow solution providers to build complete working prototype sites that can be readily modified to meet the customer's changing needs. A set of templates with pre-built Java Server Pages and tag libraries provides commerce functions that can be combined and reused with custom text and graphics for rapid site development.

"The templates are good for solution providers because they provide a basic business logic flow, but not the text the customer will need," says Dave Petersen, senior product manager WebLogic Commerce Servers at BEA. "That allows the solution provider to focus on the building the content of the site."

Lerner says Xuma uses the servers as a time-saving component to its larger service offering. "A few years ago, we spent a lot of time building the e-commerce platforms. Now we just buy it from BEA," he says. "We can create a BEA-based site in a day, and that allows us to focus on the hardware and software integration that really demands our time and effort."

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