BEA Leads New Category

Vendor believes integration should start at the top of the development cycle

BEA System Inc.'s new WebLogic Platform 8.1 puts it as much as three years ahead of competitors, according to Gartner Research. In fact, Gartner created a new software category, called Integrated Services Environment, and named BEA as its leader.

Known for its integration, portal, application server, and development tools, BEA has now delivered the first generally available product from the vision it outlined at this year's BEA World in March. The company sums up that vision with the word "convergence." All BEA WebLogic products are now part of a common code base designed to break down barriers between enterprise integration and software development.

The integrated development cycle begins with process modeling. The modeling environment resembles what you see in, for example, IBM's Rational or Microsoft's Visio. A business analyst can select from a list of enterprise applications and services, for example, then drag and drop them into the model. Models can be reused.

Developers then take over, modifying the code generated from the business analyst's model. The coded process can instantly be converted into a control, which can then be reused in other applications.

The developer environment is also designed to ease J2EE development for programmers who may be untrained in a J2EE environment but familiar with others, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio or Sybase's PowerBuilder.

The point is to reduce the amount of time that elapses between a business requirement change and the moment when the IT department satisfies that requirement.

Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP Services, called the release of WebLogic Platform 8.1 a "game changing play" at the product launch event and said that it makes BEA a "key partner for HP to deliver the Adaptive Enterprise vision to its customers."

Shunning the vendor with the greatest new license revenue in 2002, Livermore said IBM's WebSphere, although marketed as an integrated suite, consists of incompatible products cobbled together onto 360 installation CDs.

An IBM spokesperson later responded, "IBM has been building and evolving WebSphere — based on customer requirements — beyond just the application server and into a full platform for e-business. It's a winning strategy: IBM is number one in application servers, portals, and integration, according to Gartner Dataquest. It's a strategy certain competitors are now imitating."

BEA put research and development money into this platform at a time when many companies were scaling back, because chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang believed it filled a large and growing, but unmet, need. Composite applications are becoming more widely distributed, thanks to the fast emergence of Web services.

There's also a growing call for applications to be integrated through the lens of a business process. The new WebLogic platform release is designed to answer this call. SAP's NetWeaver is another prominent vendor play toward business process integration (BPI).

Chuang, when asked to compare BEA's WebLogic Platform strategy to that of SAP's NetWeaver, said that true enterprise BPI will never be dominated by a packaged applications vendor. Competing vendors, which often coexist in large enterprises, aren't likely to adopt the BPI framework of their rival, he said.

— Jeanette Burriesci

RESOURCES

"Integrated Development" (News & Analysis), May 13, 2003

Gartner First Take, May 7, 2003, FT-20-0227

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