Rallying Round BEAs Weblogic

BEA Systems Inc.s weblogic application server continues to be a platform for developers and partners to rally around. Last week, e-business application provider Art Technology Group Inc. announced that its CRM (customer relationship management) product is available on WebLogic. At the same time, Resonate Inc. said its traffic management tool also now supports the leading application server.

ATG, of Cambridge, Mass., announced the availability of its ATG Dynamo e-business applications for e-commerce, relationship management and portals running WebLogic, from BEA, of San Jose, Calif.

The announcement makes good on a promise ATG made in July to deploy its entire application suite on the leading J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application servers.

ATG officials said WebLogic is the first third-party application server supported by ATG. The application server works with ATGs Dynamo Version 5.6, Enterprise Portal and Enterprise Commerce Suites.

The announcement comes as good news to Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., which has standardized on both WebLogic and IBMs WebSphere and uses ATGs CRM software. The customer service applications are all founded on the BEA platform.

"It allows us to pick which technologies I want to use on which layer of the platform and then make sure they interoperate properly and have them be well-behaved in their business space," said Dan Keller, vice president of global technologies at Charles Schwab, in San Francisco. "Were trying to position ATG as the personalization server that will sit on any application server we decide to use."

Resonate, of Sunnyvale, Calif., announced it has completed interoperability testing between its Central Dispatch 4.0 and BEAs WebLogic server. Company officials said the combination will enhance the availability and performance of WebLogic environments.

Central Dispatch is a LAN-based software traffic management product that performs intelligent load balancing tasks, Resonate said. It enables multiple WebLogic servers to act as a single server system. As part of its announcement, Resonate said it is providing BEA customers with a three-node version of Central Dispatch 4.0 as a free Web download.

Karen Styres, vice president of marketing and business development at Resonate, said Central Dispatch complements the availability and scalability features that already exist in WebLogic.

"Each application servers configuration and approach is quite unique," Styres said. Yet, WebLogic is "conducive" to Resonates solution, she said.

Resonates technology performs resource-based load balancing, taking into account the resources available on the WebLogic server, Styres said. This approach differs from hardware-based load balancers, which rely on algorithms to handle its tasks, she said.

The company said Central Dispatch can then control user traffic and direct users to the most available resources for the service being accessed, including e-business transactions.