BEA Unfurls EAI Offering

The software, Liquid Data for WebLogic, will act as an add-on product to BEA's application server, integration, portal or WebLogic Enterprise platform products and will be priced at $25,000 per CPU, said Mark Carges, president of BEA's Enterprise Framework Division.

Liquid Data uses XMLQuery language and a real-time transaction engine to "provide realtime views of disparate enterprise data," he said.

"This was a very difficult thing to do in the past," Carges said. "You can't do it easily without writing code through traditional EAI approaches and using adapters."

Liquid Data will save solution providers time because they won't have to write separate business processes to retrieve information from various data stores when building an EAI solution, Carges said. Instead, they will have a single view of all information resources available in an IT system by using Liquid Data, he said.

Adam Farrell, director of business development, western region at solution provider Semaphore Partners, San Francisco, said Liquid Data dramatically lowers a customer's integration costs.

However, Farrell said Liquid Data is "very bleeding-edge" and might be a tough sell.

"BEA has a great opportunity," Farrell said. "They need to get that story in the market for CIOs who have cost-cutting imperatives."

Mike Gilpin, research fellow at Giga Information Group, said he thinks Liquid Data is ultimately a useful product. Still, Gilpin called the product a "long shot" in terms of acceptance because he is unsure if customers will understand the need for it.

"[Liquid Data is solving a problem that is real, but [customers need to stand farther back from the forest to actually see that you have the problem," he said. "People don't take the time to look at the data they have and how heterogeneous it is."