VISUALIZATION

BEA Enters OEM Agreement with StrikeIron to Enable Front Office to Back Office Integration, Bring Live Data to Business Users via Microsoft Excel: BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the release of AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5, which provides a virtual, unified view of data regardless of its type or location within the enterprise. BEA also announced a strategic OEM relationship with StrikeIron, Inc., the provider of the largest marketplace of externally available plug-and-play Web services. The company is collaborating with StrikeIron to incorporate their OnDemand Web Services for Microsoft Excel product into the latest version of ALDSP, in order to facilitate the integration of backend data with the front office user. "Up to 70 percent of application development time can be spent accessing disparate data. As a result, data should be one of the first things to be service-enabled using a Service-Oriented Architecture approach. As companies decouple or abstract their data from applications and the data source in SOAs, they need to be able to ensure compliance and control over the data more than ever before," said Paul Patrick, vice president and chief architect for AquaLogic, BEA Systems, Inc. "ALDSP 2.5 service-enables and aggregates data that traditionally has been locked in disparate silos across the enterprise. It's the live data engine powering the service-driven enterprise." ALDSP is a key product within the AquaLogic product family, which is part of the BEA SOA 360 platform. Announced today at BEAWorld 2006, the BEA SOA 360 platform is designed to deliver the industry's most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA's product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic(R), Tuxedo and the company's newest product initiative, BEA Workspace 360. (See Sept. 19, 2006, press release titled, "BEA Announces SOA 360; Industry's Most Unified SOA Platform to Transform and Optimize Business.") Data delivery through SOA offers today's best and most reliable solution to many of the typical obstacles, such as diverse data source types, decentralized information repositories and various technology limitations. ALDSP represents a new paradigm for data access and management in the enterprise, through delivery of information as a service to people, processes and applications. BEA ALDSP 2.5 offers fast-path integration with other critical service infrastructure platform products, such AquaLogic Service Bus, helping to enable companies to fully realize the benefits of a full SOA implementation. In addition, this latest version is designed to deliver greater flexibility to support Web services and reporting tools with a bilingual engine to both XQuery and, now, SQL. "Traditional data integration methods are costly in terms of time and resources and typically results in data that becomes quickly outdated," said Bob Brauer, chief executive officer and president, StrikeIron. "The ALDSP Excel capability helps put a face on the BEA SOA solution, empowering business users to access real-time data across the enterprise in an environment that they are already familiar with and without any programming. This also frees up IT resources and support requirements so they can be re-allocated to business critical efforts. Solutions like these can have a tremendous effect on the bottom line." Latest Release Delivers Data Access and Productivity New features in BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5 include: -- Native Integration with AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB). A complete SOA implementation requires both an enterprise service bus and a data services layer working seamlessly in concert. The release offers a custom transport path where data services within ALDSP can be directly accessed by the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus product, providing better performance, security and full array of data and services management capabilities. -- Native SQL Support. Adding a native SQL interface to ALDSP maximizes an organization's return on investment for implementing a data services layer since more clients such as business intelligence reporting tools can consume data services and benefit from better performance, data reuse and consistency. ALDSP is now optimized for both SQL and XQuery, acting as a bilingual engine, enabling it to not only cover a broader set of business intelligence use cases but also deliver real-time views of business data to reporting tools from relational and non-relational sources such as packaged applications or Web services. -- ALDSP Microsoft Excel Support. BEA is now able to bring live data to business users via Web Services within Microsoft Excel from multiple, diverse data sources. This new feature connects the front office to the heterogeneous back office -- empowering business users by providing simple drag and drop data service directly into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This offloads the high cost and time associated with data integration efforts required by IT and instead gives business users greater office productivity at their fingertips. Availability ALDSP 2.5 is available today. For more information, visit bea.com/aqualogic or see the product in action at BEAWorld. Register today at its Web site.