BEA Revises Goals For Building Developer Community

To spur growth, BEA, based here, Monday launched the BEA an online membership program, which gives developers free access to resources through BEA's dev2dev developer portal, BEA officials said.

At BEA's eWorld annual developer conference in February, BEA CEO and President Alfred Chuang introduced the dev2dev site as a comprehensive resource for its growing developer community. At the time, he said BEA hoped the site would help build its developer community of 350,000 to 1 million by the end of 2002.

Dev2dev went live in May. At the time, Scott Fallon, vice president of developer and partner programs at BEA, said the company had a little more than 400,000 developers in its community, and was on track to reach the 1 million goal by year's end.

BEA's developer community now stands at about 425,000 members, the BEA spokeswoman said. She said that because "the economy has stayed sub-par longer than many anticipated," growth rates for the developer base have not been as high as projected.

BEA has "reset our expectations accordingly" for growth in its developer numbers, the spokeswoman said. She did not comment on how many developers the company hopes to register by the end of the year.

The new online membership program, free to developers, offers a variety of developer resources, such as Webinars, technical presentations and excerpts from technical journals, free of charge to registered users, according to BEA. Developers can sign up now here.

In addition to resources to help developers use BEA technology, the new membership program also offers discounts on the following: developer training; registration to BEA and partner events; and subscriptions to developer journals, company officials said.