BEA Signs Up Deloitte As Global Partner

BEA Systems Deloitte Consulting

The move supports a recent strategy by BEA, based here, to consolidate its number of global alliances, focusing on 10 key strategic partners to help it co-sell and co-market its product line, said John Gray, vice president of global alliances at BEA.

"We've sharpened [BEA's partnership and global alliance strategy [and consolidated our approach to partnering quite radically," said Gray. "We've consolidated down to those players that are critical to us and to winning market spaces, [such as financial services, manufacturing and consumer."

The Deloitte deal, which currently is for one year but likely will be renewed, will target vertical markets with two repeatable solutions, Deloitte Network Advantage (DNA) and Enterprise Web Infrastructure (EWI), said Mike DeBellis, e-business CTO of Deloitte.

DNA is a B2B collaborative commerce solution set that "uses BEA [products to integrate enterprise applications like i2 [and Ariba and provides a complete infrastructure for B2B collaboration," said DeBellis. EWI is a framework for helping companies deploy a Web services architecture so they eventually can move toward an open-source development model rather than a proprietary one, he said.

He added, however, that despite all the hype, Web services are still in their nascent stage and will remain that way throughout 2002.

"I don't see them taking off in a big way even next year," said DeBellis. "Even this coming year is still going to be early adopters and specific applications that make a lot of sense to share across firewalls."

Markets targeted by BEA and Deloitte will be the public sector and the telecom markets, two spaces in which the companies already have jointly deployed successful solutions. The deal also will focus on offering solutions in two new markets, financial services and manufacturing, said DeBellis.

BEA's Gray would not disclose how big an investment BEA is making in Deloitte, but he said it is comparable to similar deals the company recently unveiled with EDS and Accenture.

To date, BEA has unveiled eight of the 10 global alliance partners with which it plans to do much of its high-end business, said Gray. In addition to Deloitte, EDS, Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, BEA also named Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), KPMG, Cap Gemini Ernst and Young and Andersen as global alliance partners. It will unveil two more in coming months, said Gray.

Deloitte's DeBellis did not cite a specific dollar amount but said Deloitte's deal with BEA is "definitely in the multimillion-dollar range."