VISUALIZATION

Six months after unveiling its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy during its launch of AquaLogic, a Service Infrastructure product family, BEA Systems, reports that customers, partners and the IT industry are responding enthusiastically to its "Think liquid" vision. More than 100 customers across a wide range of vertical industries have already deployed BEA's AquaLogic platform, the architectural backbone of BEA's 'Think liquid' vision. These customers include Deutsche Bank Alex Brown and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). BEA's AquaLogic and WebLogic families of products provide the underpinning to BEA's 'Think liquid' vision, announced last June. That vision challenges IT to move beyond the business silos and vertically integrated "software stacks" of old, to a new world order based on horizontally integrated "Service Networks" aimed at helping quickly deliver business, IT, personal and professional services to improve enterprise productivity. "In June, we challenged the industry to 'Think liquid', in order to move beyond the old application software stacks to new service networks, which we see as essential to improving enterprise productivity and remaining competitive," said Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive officer, BEA Systems, Inc. "The response we've seen has surpassed even our own high expectations. With the help of BEA and the software infrastructure we provide through Tuxedo, WebLogic and AquaLogic products, enterprises all over the world are rapidly moving from SOA pilots to full SOA production. The unified service infrastructure we are providing via AquaLogic is the platform that is helping enable this global shift. And this is only the beginning. As we evolve our infrastructure product lines, the momentum will only accelerate." BEA made further announcements today that will continue to drive SOA momentum, including the unveiling of its AquaLogic User Interaction product line and new versions of its AquaLogic Enterprise Security and AquaLogic Service Bus. Additional AquaLogic products are scheduled to be introduced in early 2006. BEA also announced an SOA certification program for IT architects. AquaLogic is designed to help organizations free up isolated or "frozen" IT assets for on-the-fly configuration, re-use, and composition of new applications to meet changing business needs. It offers an open and independent platform for developing, deploying, managing and operating a complete service-oriented architecture (SOA) in heterogeneous computing environments, including .Net, Java or legacy systems. As part of BEA's overall product family, it also contributes to BEA's "blended" application strategy, which is designed to help enable customers to bring together open source and commercial software in a way that can radically improve developer productivity. BEA Continues to Demonstrate SOA Leadership -- BEA Unveils Unified Portal Strategy; AquaLogic Products Announced As a leader in SOA, BEA continues to innovate its AquaLogic product family. Today, BEA introduced its strategy for evolving its portal technologies that will provide companies with a business interaction platform to create interactive portals, collaborative communities and composite applications in an open environment. BEA's portal vision is a key component for the practical adoption of SOA within organizations and is designed to address an emerging category of enterprise software -- Service Infrastructure. Over the next two years, BEA plans to combine aspects of the WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic product families to provide common portal infrastructure services, application services and tools that can be used with future versions of both WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction. This approach can provide existing customers a natural upgrade path and enhances the value of their investments in BEA portal technologies by allowing them to leverage a common set of services across both portal products and other Web applications. BEA's ability to offer a common portal infrastructure comes in part from its recent acquisition of Plumtree Software, a provider of enterprise portal solutions. In addition, BEA today announced that AquaLogic Enterprise Security 2.1 and AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1 will be available later this month. The new products will help accelerate the shift to SOA adoption. AquaLogic Enterprise Security 2.1's new features include extension of its fine-grained authorization capabilities to support data-level security through integration with AquaLogic Data Services Platform, further standards support with XACML 2.0 and SAML 1.1, and enhanced administration via a Web Services Interface. The product is also in evaluation for Common Criteria certification EAL4. AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1's new features will enhance reliability, availability, scalabity and performance. The features include a new test console, which simplifies testing new services and service changes before deployment; tighter integration with AquaLogic Service Registry, which will accelerate service provisioning; enhanced security policy management with support of SAML 1.1; support for B2B and EDI use cases through interoperability with Cyclone Interchange; and additional monitoring capabilities, including additional new alert metrics and more flexible ways to collect and view statistics. In addition to continued innovation, BEA is helping to drive the adoption of SOA and the AquaLogic product family by working with numerous systems integrators and resellers, including Accenture, CSC and HP. For more information, visit its Web site. BEA Announces SOA Certification Program for Architects To further drive the adoption of SOA, BEA also announced an SOA Certification Program for enterprise architects, the first of its kind in the industry. The program, uniquely tailored to architects who oversee the design of enterprise applications and infrastructures that leverage BEA technologies, is designed to certify users on the BEA SOA Domain Model. Certified candidates will be experts in BEA's approach to SOA and will be adept at making architectural decisions in an SOA context and ensuring best-of-breed technology identification and implementation. For more information about the program, go to its Web site. Innovation from BEA Continues Across All Product Lines In the past months, BEA also continued to innovate with its WebLogic, JRockit and Tuxedo products, which support the company's SOA strategy. In July, BEA unveiled the latest version of the company's software product for high transaction processing, Tuxedo 9.0. Tuxedo 9.0 is designed to help customers build new and repurpose legacy applications and extend them to SOA. In August, BEA announced BEA WebLogic 9.0, an application server fitted with a unique enterprise-grade kernel that supports multiple programming models. WebLogic Server 9.0 enables businesses to focus on moving toward SOA as it is designed to help IT administrators and developers increase productivity, reduce cost of IT projects and decrease downtime. At BEAWorld Tokyo, BEA unveiled BEA WebLogic SIP Server 2.1. This application server is the industry's first standards-based, carrier-grade, integrated J2EE and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) application server providing support for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), clustering-based high availability, and industry-leading high performance based on optimized SIP engine tier tuning. The BEA IMS application server is the latest release of the BEA WebLogic SIP Server component of the BEA WebLogic Communications Platform and is generally available today. JRockit, BEA's Java Virtual Machine, continues to set industry records for speed and performance, making it the ideal backbone for BEA's SOA strategy. Visit its Web site to download your free copy today.