BEA aims for 360° view of SOAs

Middleware specialist announces new products and services at user event

Middleware specialist BEA Systems continued its transformation into a provider of service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies last week with the unveiling of a number of new products and services at its BEAWorld user event in San Francisco.

At the centre of its announcements was the introduction of SOA 360°, a new unified SOA platform that the company said would work across its Tuxedo, WebLogic and AquaLogic middleware suites and make it easier for firms to deploy and manage SOA environments that simplify the integration and reuse of application components or services.

Announcing the 360° concept Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive of BEA, said that it would help firms make sense of their disparate systems and applications and remove a lot of the complexity from fulfilling simple user and customer requests.
"Over 10 years firms have built up incredible complexity," he said. "People jump from one application to another just to fulfill a task. SOA reduces costs across the board and puts the business back in charge of the business. You, not your applications are in control."

BEA said the platform had been built on a new microService Architecture based on common standards and leverages common protocols and web languages including SOAP, XML Schema, RSS and SAML. Unlike other similar tools it does not rely on point to point integration, BEA added.

On top of the new platform BEA is also planning to launch a new SOA development environment next year. Previewed at the event, WorkSpace 360° is a collaborative environment that lets architects, developers and IT managers work together on SOA's and SOA-enabled applications. WorkSpace central works as an umbrella, allowing these units to collaborate on lifecycle and asset management as well as project-based team collaboration, the company said.

The company also moved to make it easier for existing customers to develop an SOA environment with the launch of a new suite called Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) 1.1, designed to help firms transform their applications into web services and easily move them onto an SOA. Built on SOAP, SALT can help firms move their apps away from C, C++ or Cobol, and over to JEE or .NET, the company said.

Terry Barrett, vice president of education at BEA, said: "It is about taking legacy systems and bringing them into the SOA world. Using our tools, legacy systems can now easily be turned into web services."

Chuang predicted widespread support for the new platform, claiming that 85 percent of BEA customers had said that an SOA was an important part of their ongoing strategies. "SOA is very real," he argued. "Customers are using it and it will fundamentally change the way that businesses work."

In his keynote speech, Chuang also released details of the patent pending Guardian Pre-Emptive Support Service, which is due for release in December 2006. Describing it as being like "anti-virus for applications", Chuang said it would, "prevent, pre-empt, find and cure problems in enterprise software".

In order to prevent problems Guardian will use a reference library of signatures and apply these to its 24x7 application and systems monitoring tools, he explained. If problems are identified the system will alert users and where applicable recommend software updates, service packs or patches.

Separately at the event, BEA unveiled updates to its AquaLogic line of SOA management tools, including a new version of its Data Services Platform following a new OEM agreement with StrikeIron, and a new enterprise repository, resulting from its acquisition of Flashline.