BEA Launches Plans To Take On EAI Vendors

BEA Systems

The new strategy also will give BEA more ammunition against leading competitor IBM, which has built its integration portfolio into one of the strongest in the industry.

At its annual Financial Analyst Day here Monday, BEA unveiled two product releases to support a broader strategy of building out its customer base and growing the company into a world-class software organization, executives said.

The first new product is Liquid Data, which uses a combination of XML Query Language and a realtime transaction engine for data aggregation across an enterprise, said Olivier Helleboid, new president of BEA's Products Organization. Liquid Data will be released later this month, he said.

The second significant release will be WebLogic Workshop 8.0, due out next spring, Helleboid said. The new product builds on the current 7.0 product,which gives application developers not skilled in the J2EE environment the ability to build Web services,by adding functionality to build full, enterprise-scale J2EE- and XML-based Web applications.

WebLogic Workshop 8.0 also will be tied to BEA's portal, Liquid Data and WebLogic Integration products to comprise a complete application development and integration solution, Helleboid added.

In essence, BEA plans to give customers the full development platform company executives said they've been asking for, one that links simplified application development and EAI as if they are one requirement, not two separate needs.

"Every integration problem requires some development," said Chet Kapoor, vice president and general manager of BEA's Integration Group. "The same thing with development projects,they require some integration. So why the chasm between the two?"

Mike Gilpin, research fellow at Giga Information Group, said this linking of integration and application development is dead on, and is in fact something he outlined in a research paper in May called "Application Development and Integration: Solutions Converge to the Benefit of Both."

Gilpin said that application development and integration are also reasons why BEA loses in competitive situations, so it is wise for the company to be moving in this direction.

"If you look at historically where they were losing to IBM or other vendors, it's usually not the app server that's the reason," said Gilpin. "It's usually software issues around development tools and integration. This was an area where they need to shore up. And they're doing more than shoring it up,they're aiming to become excellent in those areas."

In addition to its new Liquid Data product and WebLogic Workshop 8.0, existing BEA products round out the company's application infrastructure strategy, Helleboid said.

All of BEA's application development software is build on its industry-leading application server, WebLogic Server, which is the foundation product for the entire platform.

BEA also counts its portal, WebLogic Portal, and its EAI product, WebLogic Integration, as key to its new integration strategy, making up the layer of the platform that can integrate data across all levels of an organization, Helleboid said. The integration layer sits between WebLogic Server and the WebLogic Workshop development environment.

In addition to launching a new product direction, BEA also introduced a new executive team, many of whom previously held top positions at vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

New to BEA's management team are a new channel chief, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Partner and Alliance Strategies Morris Beton, who most recently was vice president of U.S. Services for Microsoft; Helleboid, who joined BEA this past August from Rainfinity and heads up the newly formed BEA Products Organization; and Tom Ashburn, president of the Worldwide Services Division, who was wooed out of retirement after a 33-year career at Hewlett-Packard.

Other new BEA executives include Senior Vice President for Americas Sales Alan Fudge, formerly a head sales executive at Tivoli; and Kapoor, who previously worked at webMethods.

The presence of such an impressive new management team shows BEA is poised to grow its company to the next level on its rise from a niche middleware player to a global software organization, said Giga's Gilpin.

"As you're looking to grow a company to the next stage, you're trying to attract a management team to take you there, and I think [BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang has done that," Gilpin said.