BEA Gets SOA for Effort

Under BEA's new Enterprise Solutions Program, the infrastructure software company provides a new go-to-market methodology for its professional services organization and systems integrator partners. In addition, the company is providing integration components that will make it easier to plug in composite applications.

On the face of it, BEA's offering sounds similar to one that IBM introduced this past April. What primarily sets it apart is the fact that a number of ISV partners, such as Documentum, Hyperion and Interwoven, have worked with BEA to provide either prepackaged composite applications or application "controls" that automatically plug into BEA's WebLogic server software. Controls -- which can be Web services, APIs or Enterprise JavaBeans, for example -- pull an application's logic into the WebLogic Workshop IDE. In effect, the Enterprise Solutions Program offers out of the box integration with applications from at least 12 ISV partners.

In addition, BEA is providing reference architectures, workflow templates and prebuilt portlets for five functional areas. These solution frameworks, as BEA calls them, help companies craft SOAs for customer service, employee service, RFID, securities processing in financial services and service delivery in the telco industry.

Finally, BEA and its strategic systems integrator partners -- including EDS, CSC, Infosys and Enterpulse -- have developed methodologies to assess SOA-readiness of customers' IT systems, and then determine the next step on their SOA journeys.

"Now we can reach out to a customer, understand its progress toward a specific goal such as multichannel banking, and lay out out a visual map and proof of concept for what the end state could look like," said Mark Atherton, vice president of BEA's Enterprise Solutions Group.