BEA, Intel To Unveil Alliance Plans

The plans are the result of an alliance, first introduced in July 2001, to expand both the reach of Intel-based servers in the enterprise, and to increase BEA's opportunity to run its middleware on non-Unix servers.

John Davies, Intel's vice president and general manager of EBiz channels and marketing, said BEA and Intel will give solution providers a Java Product Bundle to enable BEA's middleware to run on Intel-compatible operating systems, including Windows and Linux.

The bundle includes a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) BEA acquired from Swedish company Appeal Virtual Machines, as part of a joint effort by Intel and BEA to find a JVM suitable for the project, said Davies.

BEA founder, CEO and President Alfred Chuang unveiled the acquisition of Appeal and its JVM, JRockit, in his keynote address Monday to kick off the show, which is BEA's seventh annual developer conference.

BEA has been under considerable competitive pressure from large server vendors, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, which both have invested heavily in developing and marketing competitive Java-based e-business middleware platforms. Currently, most BEA deployments run on Unix-based servers, such as those from Sun.

Intel's Davies said that while there are some BEA implementations on Intel, the WebLogic platform has not performed as well as technologies from competitors such as Microsoft and IBM. Now, BEA's alliance with Intel will broaden BEA's reach in the competitive server market by giving solution providers an optimized version of the WebLogic platform for Intel, he said.

"A key software company wants to run on as many [server environments as they can," said Davies. "This gives BEA the ability to have a competitive product on Intel."