BEA gives SOA full 360° treatment

BEA Systems has unveiled plans to launch infrastructure software designed for a service-orientated architecture (SOA).

The BEA SOA 360°software will span three of BEA’s product lines — Aqualogic, WebLogic and Tuxedo and will use the company’s native microServices Architecture (mSA).

BEA made the announcement at the company’s BEAWorld event in San Francisco, US, this month, which focused on SOA and the company’s infrastructure technologies.

Speaking at BEAWorld, Alfred Chuang, chairman and CEO of BEA, claimed: “BEA approaches every market opportunity with innovation, architectural excellence and an unyielding standard of reliability and availability.”

“The BEA SOA 360° platform is the result of nearly US$500million in investment and the complete focus of the company.”“Unlike our competitors, we believe that SOA is not only a market opportunity, it is a fundamental approach to business, enterprise architecture and our platform itself,” he added.

The software will be supported by BEA’s new collaborative tooling environment BEA Work- Space 360° — due to launch in 2007 — the industry’s first setof unified SOA tools that bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT professionals together into a shared workspace to work on joint projects.

BEA’s software is used to build and run custom-written applications such as corporate portals or websites. The mSA will provide low-level services to a number of applications and will conform to web services and Java standards, the firm said.

SOA offers a way to build applications as a set of interconnected components or services and is designed to help businesses re-use services making application development faster and cheaper. This allows them to better respond to changing business demands and conditions.

Alongside the new infrastructure software the firm is to launch a suite of SOA services, BEA SOA for Executives which it said was the first BEA suite of SOA consulting and education services for senior IT executives that would enable them to realise the business value of SOA.

The product will be based on native SOA standards, which will make it more open and interoperable and suitable for third party development, the company claimed.