Interview: BEA bets on web services boom

IT Week:As technology director at middleware vendor BEA Systems, what do you believe are the essentials for viable web services?

Jim Rivera: If you are messaging between enterprise applications you need reliability. You need to know the message has reached its destination but HTTP doesn't give you that certainty. HTTP is great because it is ubiquitous, but if you want to use it in the enterprise it just hasn't been reliable enough.

IT Week:So, what has BEA been doing to tackle the problem?

We've worked on new specifications with Microsoft and IBM to enhance messaging reliability for WebLogic 9.0, which is due for release in the autumn.

IT Week:How does the enchancement work?

It works through store-and-forward technology. We store the message as it is sent and then send it repeatedly until notification is received that the message arrived.

IT Week:What other issues have hampered adoption of web services?

There are still security fears. Enterprises need certainty that messages between applications cannot be viewed and we've tackled this in our last two releases by including full encryption capabilities. Web services are already pretty well adopted, but now these new security and reliability protocols have been added we will see web services used in far more scenarios.

IT Week:Does BEA plan to launch any other systems this autumn?

We will release our new message routing technology currently codenamed QuickSilver. With service-oriented architectures [SOAs] you tend to get point-to-point messages constantly flying across the infrastructure between different software silos. QuickSilver directs everything through a central router. As a result you can monitor, manage, replicate and add security to messages. It gives you a central place to control your infrastructure.

IT Week:What are the practical benefits for IT managers?

QuickSilver means that when you need to work on a specific system or roll out an upgrade you can easily reroute messages elsewhere in the infrastructure without having to take down the whole system. Management and maintenance represents 70 percent of IT costs and companies moved towards an SOA approach to help reduce those costs. With QuickSilver they can really begin to generate savings from their SOA.

IT Week:What else is in the pipeline?

We are also launching a new communications middleware platform. It will initially be targeted at the telecoms industry and will offer new protocols to more fully support mobile and VoIP [voice over IP] technology. While it will be first targeted at telecoms carriers, once it is rolled out we expect to see demand from other industries.

About Jim Rivera

Jim Rivera is director of technology at BEA Systems and has responsibilities for "evangelising" about BEA products.

He joined BEA in 1999 as lead technical product manager for BEA WebLogic Server 6,7 and 8 releases and has 13 years of software development and strategy experience.