BEA pitches native SOA platform
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(InfoWorld) - SAN FRANCISCO -- Positioning itself as the industry's first provider of a native SOA platform, BEA Systems unveiled SOA 360 -- as in 360 degrees -- at Tuesdays' BEAWorld 2006. The vagueness of the announcement, however, has at least one analyst claiming the company still has a lot of explaining to do. SOA 360 spans three BEA product families -- Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic -- and features an SOA collaborative tooling environment, called BEA WorkSpace 360. Another key element is the company's "microServices Architecture," aka mSA. Based on SOA and the concept of a services network, mSA features modular services based on BEA products, is event-driven, and uses notification services to publish and discover modular components or "microServices." WorkSpace 360 includes a product family due in 2007. It is geared to enable business and IT professionals to collaborate and work individually and features roles for the business analyst, enterprise architect, developer, and IT operations professional. Working with the role-based products is WorkSpace Central, which is designed to provide SOA lifecycle management and centers around the company's metadata repository, AquaLogic Enterprise Repository. "SOA 360 is a governing approach to modeling, creating, developing, and deploying a full lifecycle SOA application. It is a unifying methodology," featuring all of BEA's SOA products, said Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA. "I'm here to tell you with confidence that SOA is very real," BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang said in a keynote presentation focused on SOA. Details provided during presentations on Tuesday, however, were too vague, said Shawn Willet, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "There's just too many unanswered questions right now," Willett said. For instance, it is unclear what makes something mSA-enabled, Willett said. He did, however, praise BEA for being ahead of the pack when it launched its unified middleware platform, BEA WebLogic Platform. BEA's modularization plans for its WebLogic Server application server were revealed in March. But the company now believes this approach can work for all its products, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA tools unit. Modularization provides the right services to the customer, Roth said. "Modularization will be a key design point for us, and ultimately this microServices Architecture will have an effect across all of our products," Roth said. BEA has set a goal of having all its products leverage mSA by the end of 2008. MSA will key in on backplane components, application frameworks, activity services, presentation services, and infrastructure services. The architecture will leverage industry protocols and standards such as OSGi, SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Security, and SAML. Also at the show on Tuesday, BEA: * announced the release of AquaLogic Enterprise Repository 2.5, a metadata repository based on the company's recently acquired Flashline technology; * launched its AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5, which provides a virtual, unified view of data regardless of type or location; * unveiled BEA Guardian Support Service, providing predictive and pre-emptive software support; * and announced the general availability of SALT (Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo) 1.1, which is intended to allow Tuxedo applications to be exposed as Web services.
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(InfoWorld) - Middleware vendor BEA Systems Inc. will lay out its Java virtualization strategy later this week in China, an approach the vendor hopes will differentiate it from its competitors. At its BEAWorld user conference in Beijing from Wednesday to Thursday, the company will announce a product road map for software due out in 2007 and aimed at optimizing how enterprise Java applications run in virtualized environments. The move has been driven by customer demand, according to Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products at BEA. Users are looking for ways to improve on the more general-purpose server virtualization capabilities already provided by vendors such as EMC Corp., XenSource Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "Customers were running into challenges around efficiency, optimization and performance," he said. Come the first quarter of next year, BEA plans to release WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), a version of its Java application server that includes the vendor's new Liquid VM technology. Liquid VM is a BEA-specific Java Virtual Machine that enables Java applications to run directly on a hypervisor without requiring an operating system to be present. Initially, Liquid VM will work only with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor, but BEA plans to support other hypervisors in future including those from XenSource and Microsoft, Churchward said. Being able to run Java applications virtually without recourse to an operating system will enable users to substantially reduce the amount of computer power, enabling them to lower the hardware costs per application. Drawing a comparison betweenÂ VMware's current approach towards application virtualization and BEA's new take, Churchward gave an analogy about moving house. VMware's like a removal firm that comes in and packages up the entire contents of a person's house and transports it using massive trucks. "Once you open the boxes at your new place, you discover you don't need 60 percent of it," he said. BEA's approach resembles an individual taking the time to go through all their possessions prior to moving and throwing away what they don't need, therefore requiring smaller vans to transport their belongings. "BEA's approach directly targets Java infrastructure flexibility, which has not always been the platform's core strength," James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, wrote in an e-mail interview. He believes the vendor is the first among the major middleware vendors to go down this path, but points to smaller companies Cassatt Corp. and DataSynapse Inc., which are already pursuing what he terms "a virtualize/automate/WebLogic strategy." Due out in the summer of 2007 is Liquid Operations Control (LOC), BEA software to manage and control Java applications running on virtualized infrastructure. While users can combine LOC and Liquid VM to improve their WebLogic virtualization capabilities, BEA intends to widen LOC's scope so it can be applied to all enterprise Java applications, Churchward said, including support for the Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat technology. Moving to manage other Java application servers is a course BEA has already begun to pursue, Governor wrote. "It's the right strategy, which BEA could dramatically accelerate by purchasing Covalent," he added. Open-source company Covalent Technologies Inc. provides products and services for Tomcat and other Apache software including the Axis Web service framework and Geronimo application server. Â
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Red Hat is using JBoss World 2008 in Orlando as a launching pad for a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform designed to accelerate the deployment of open-source middleware by larger enterprises.
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IBM on Wednesday formally announced the next major release of WebSphere, code-named Vela, which company officials see as an integral building block for both its ongoing SOA (service-oriented architecture) and On Demand strategies.
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(InfoWorld) - Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures)Â this week,Â MicrosoftÂ  unveiled new guidelines for partners create an enterprise service bus (ESB). Usually, BEA Systems and IBM beat the SOA drum the loudest, but Microsoft renamed its Business Process and Integration Conference for BizTalk partners "SOA and Business Process Conference" with the aim demonstrate that it, too, has a plan for helping customers build SOAs. Microsoft has had itsÂ business process integration product BizTalk since 2000, but it has not been as vocal as competitors BEA and IBM in discussing a comprehensive SOA strategy. SOA is the next generation of enterprise software architectures, in which applications and services within the IT system are loosely coupled and able to be integrated piecemeal to form custom, or "composite," applications from various components across the enterprise. Microsoft worked with partner Neudesic to provide sample code and documentation for using BizTalk Server to build an ESB, which Microsoft defines as a set of capabilities -- such as mediation, transformation and integration -- for connecting business processes and services throughout the organization, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management. The company also unveiled a new adapter for Extensible Markup Language-based BizTalk that enables customers to connect the product more easily to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. The technology, called the BizTalk Adapter for Host Systems, is based on technologies available in Microsoft's Host Integration Server product, which the company has had for some time, Martin said. John Devadoss, a Microsoft director of architecture, said it is still finding a lot of misconceptions about SOAs among its customers, who think they have to rearchitect their entire software infrastructure "from the top down" to build SOAs. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that SOAs are more successful if there is a "real-world business driver" behind the architecture, he said. "In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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GT Software next week will formally unveil its platform for outfitting mainframe applications with Web services functionality and linking legacy data into SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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BEA Systems at the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday is adding the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open source development initiative.
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BEA Systems Inc. chose the opening day of competitor Oracle&#39;s annual user conference in San Francisco to talk about its next version of the BEA WebLogic Application Server platform.
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InfoWorld - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft&#39;s .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday.
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Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.Mainframes like IBM&#39;s System z are integral to SOA almost by default because they contain a large portion of the world&#39;s business information, the study suggests. Thirty percent of respondents who work for companies with 10,000 or more employees said between 51 percent and 75 percent of their company&#39;s data is managed and stored on a mainframe, according to the study.Meanwhile, nearly 23 percent of respondents said their company is undergoing a SOA project, and another third said a SOA is in the planning or consideration stages.Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are pursuing an enterprise-wide SOA, but in most cases, the projects are confined to niche instances, such specific lines of business or divisions or within applications.&quot;Many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications,&quot; said Pamela Taylor, vice president of strategic development for SHARE and a solutions architect for a subsidiary of a Fortune 50 company. &quot;System z tends to be absolutely critical to deployments.&quot;While mainframes play a dominant role in hosting an enterprise&#39;s data, companies&#39; interaction with that data faces constraints. At least 50 percent of the companies surveyed use hand-coded scripts to push mainframe-based data to other databases or platforms, according to the study. Such scripting is hard to maintain, particularly if the programmers who wrote it leave the organization, the study notes.IBM has aligned System z with SOA.The study notes that SOA can strain systems, such as through its use of XML-based messaging. &quot;Rather than acquire more server hardware to attempt to address growing SOA performance issues, mainframes may represent a more cost-effective option for leveraging existing resources,&quot; the study states.In turn, the abstraction layer a SOA provides can help enterprises more easily tap their existing mainframe applications and data, the study notes.Sales for System z fell last year but IBM is banking on the launch of its next-generation mainframe in February.Some 431 SHARE members responded to the survey, which was conducted by Unisphere Research. About 48 percent work for companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 26 percent of respondents&#39; firms have more than $1 billion in revenue.
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Blog: BEA's Aqualogic-branded collaboration tools look to take consumer Web techniques to business setting.
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Integration software company WebMethods builds out its SOA product line with Infravio's registry.
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BEA Systems is readying the release of new software that will combine an enterprise service bus (ESB) and Web services management software into one product, a company executive said Friday.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems on Wednesday continued to promote SOA 360, its newly announced SOA platform, at the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference. The company is making SOA, in which applications are offered as componentized services and combined for new applications, its focal point. BEA officials touted SOA 360, announced Tuesday and featuring BEA AquaLogic, WebLogic, and Tuxedo product lines, as well as a collaborative tooling environment called WorkSpace 360. Also critical to SOA 360 is BEA's microService Architecture (mSA), featuring the concept of a service network and notification services for publishing and discovering modular components. "BEA is taking SOA to its very core," said Paul Patrick, chief architect for BEA AquaLogic. "We're taking SOA into the heart of what we do [on] a day-to-day basis in the way we build products." "Over 1,000 of our customers have SOA solutions in production," said Mark Carges, executive vice president of BEA's Business Interaction Division. BEA views business process management as a business driver for SOA, he said. BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of World Wide Professional Services at BEA, cited six initiatives crucial to SOA: * Defining and capturing benefits. * Establishing an enterprise architecture. * Making services engineering a discipline. * Aligning the organization for shareholder value. * Building a stream of connected projects. * Connecting the business to the capability. "If your company is going to be successful, we believe that these are things that youâre going to have to take on," Graham said. BEA in November plans to offer a series of service offerings providing guidance on service engineering, he said. Even an attendee at the conference who is not currently using SOA was sold on the concept. "I think we're headed in that direction," said Louis Leon, manager of Web services at a nonprofit organization, the name of which Leon preferred to keep anonymous. "It's an architectural strategy at this point." SOA offers a more scalable alternative to point-to-point interfaces, Leon said. Part of BEA's mSA plan involves modularizing BEA products, including its WebLogic Server Java application server. Functions of the application server such as its security apparatus could be separated from the core product and offered in a modular fashion, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. Asked when BEA would be announcing formal plans for modularizing the application server, Connell said, "Stay tuned." BEA, meanwhile, is in discussions with a car company to service-enable cars with an in-vehicle application server for high-level automotive services, said Larry Cable, BEA chief architect for WebLogic. Possible applications emanating from this arrangement could include a system that generates e-mail notifications when a car's oil needs to be changed or an application notifying drivers of available parking spaces nearby, Cable said. Also at the conference, Connell lauded an upcoming Evans Data survey that says WebLogic Server is the top choice for developers.
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(InfoWorld) - In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. Thatâs a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the companyâs stock price rose around 50 percent in the last year. But playing in a hot space such as SOA is a classic instance of having the tiger by its tail. As CEO Alfred Chuang told InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr in a recent interview, the company still needs to move aggressively to avoid being left high and dry by rapid shifts in the technology landscape. InfoWorld: What do you think is the future of enterprise software and where does BEA fits into it? Alfred Chuang: You will have vendors like us that will be selling platforms (and) application vendors that will be selling application components, yet they will be assembled on the fly by an end-user. End-users will be using a tool -- or they will be using templates or processes -- that will represent what their environment is. They can always go back to change the process on the fly, yet the components will continue to be usable within those processes. One big advantage: Youâll be able to upgrade component functionality without affecting the process itself. Today, this is a total mess. IW: Where do you think SaaS (software as a service) will fit in to this vision?                                                     AC: Like when you rent a car, you donât really care much about your car. When people drive a rent-a-car, they drive very differently from when they drive their own car. You see the craziest man driving around the hills of San Francisco in a Ford Taurus -- itâs likely to be me -- and Iâm killing the brakes coming down the streets of San Francisco, flying over the hills, because I donât give a crap. Now, if itâs my own car that Iâm driving, itâs very different. Iâll be parking at the corner parking station and making sure nobody can possibly ding me. There will be people who want full flexibility, so all they want is a rental car. There are people who will want ownership so badly ... that they will buy the software. SaaS will be able to attract small groups in large corporations, or small organizations, period. I think a successful company, including ourselves, even at the middleware layer, will have to offer both to people. IW: So youâre not ruling out offering some of what BEA offers now as a service? AC: Not only am I not ruling it out, we have to do it.Â  Iâm saying itâs not going to be 100 percent of the world. IW: What about the effect of the open source model? AC: Open source is the ultimate tool to keep us honest, especially on pricing. Linux is a good example. I spent the first half of my career from the very beginning of Sun until they were several billion dollars in size. For the longest time, Solaris was the reason people would buy a very, very expensive box. All of a sudden, people did not notice -- especially the people at Sun -- that the API was no longer dependent on Solaris. Weâre not calling any of the functions directly on the operating system anymore. They are programming that to things like J2EE. So overnight, what happened is someone came up with a computer running an operating system that J2EE can run on. Literally, thereâs no porting, thereâs no changing, nothing. In fact, the same application is being extended by buying more CPUs running Linux. Linux totally commoditized Unix in the marketplace. Open source serves [another] very important purpose, I think, which is education. SOA [service-oriented architecture] is lifting us to a different level. Look at the application server or integration software. You really want to educate developers? Let them tinker with whatâs inside so they fully understand what theyâre dealing with. A smart vendor will always watch whether their software is being commoditized. And itâs not wrong to be commoditized as long as your volume catches up with it. You must continue to innovate in abstractions at higher and higher levels. The demand is unlimited at this point in time. Look at our appetite for Internet applications. It is absolutely insatiable. We want more and more and more. I want to do everything on the Internet. If Iâm booking an airline ticket -- I just came back from Asia last night -- I did the whole thing in my car on my 3G BlackBerry.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is filling holes in its SOA (service-oriented architecture) product line-up, notably in the areas of business process management and industry-specific services. "Any holes are a recognition of what customers are trying to do," Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said. "Early SOA adopters may have found gaps and had to do some handcrafting. They can avoid doing that now." IBM Tuesday made what it billed as its most extensive rollout of SOA offerings to date, including four new products, 23 enhanced versions of existing software and 11 new services offerings. IBM positioned the news as demonstrating that the entire company is focusing its attentions squarely on the SOA space as a revenue driver. So far, IBM has helped close to 3,000 customers put in place SOA, Mills said. However, only a "relatively modest percentage" of those users have been using the SOA approach for a number of years, he added. Mills stressed IBM's need to be seen by customers as "the" industry provider of end-to-end SOA capabilities. While there are plenty of small niche SOA players, IBM mostly competes with Hewlett-Packard when pitching an SOA portfolio.Â IBM is investingÂ more than $1 billion in SOA-related areas this year, he said. One of the four new products IBM unwrapped Tuesday is WebSphere Business Services Fabric. The software is based on the technology IBM acquired when itÂ purchased niche SOA player WebifyÂ in August and also draws on services from IBM business partners. The product includes prebuilt accelerators, tools and frameworks to help ensure that SOA applications comply with specific industry regulations. Another new offering is WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR) to help customers manage their Web services and shared business processes. The software enables users to publish and find SOA services and can also hook into third-party registries and repositories. The two other new tools are Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker. IBM also has made SOA-related improvements in members of its WebSphere middleware, Rational development tools, Lotus collaboration and Tivoli systems management families. The new SOA services focus on three key areas -- security, service management and virtualization. Tracy LeGrand, chief architect and vice president of technology, strategy and architecture at Ameriprise Financial Inc., was particularly interested in the two new WebSphere products. The financial planning and banking brokerage company based in Minneapolis dates its move into what would later be termed SOA as beginning in 1999 and chose IBM as the IT vendor to help it adopt that new approach. Over the years, the customer has noted some gaps in IBM's offerings, which have required Ameriprise to act as a systems integrator. "This announcement has closed some major gaps for us," LeGrand said. "I'm not sure if there are more." IBM's WebSphere Business Services Fabric could help Ameriprise avoid duplicating work Webify and IBM have already done in providing industry-specific services relating to standards like ACORD in the insurance industry, LeGrand said. He's also interested in the vendor's WSRR since Ameriprise previously had to build its own registry.
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Not to be outdone by rival Oracle, BEA Systems has unveiled version 9.0 of its WebLogic Server application server. Homing in on the theme of service-oriented architecture deployment, BEA said the product would