BEA AquaLogic Rollout Bolsters SOA Strategy

BEA Systems Inc. last week rolled out a slew of products under the aegis of its new Enterprise Liquid Assets vision as the company continues its effort to position itself as a serious force in service-oriented architectures.

The San Jose, Calif., company unveiled its BEA AquaLogic family of products, aimed at addressing what BEA refers to as service infrastructure. Speaking at the launch event at the NASDAQ MarketSite here, Bill Roth, vice president of product management at BEA, said the AquaLogic products will complement the companys WebLogic line of tools for building applications.

In all, the BEA AquaLogic platform will consist of six product lines—three of which were announced last week along with four new products.

The first product line is AquaLogic Messaging, with the AquaLogic Service Bus as its first product. AquaLogic Service Bus, formerly code-named Quicksilver, is BEAs attempt to integrate ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and Web services management capabilities. AquaLogic Service Bus is due this summer, priced at about $45,000 per CPU.

The second new product, AquaLogic Service Registry, is a business services registry that provides a foundation for service-oriented architecture, or SOA, governance and life-cycle management. BEA also announced the AquaLogic Data product line and the new AquaLogic Data Services Platform, formerly known as Liquid Data.

The AquaLogic Data Services Platform delivers a single, unified view of data from any source across the enterprise, Roth said. This product is an implementation of the SDO (Service Data Objects) specification that BEA developed in conjunction with IBM. The product will be available later this month for about $10,000 per CPU.

Jim Pathman, CIO at San Diego-based Accredited Home Lenders Inc., a beta site for the new BEA products, said the tools "take people out of the lower-level Java [coding] stuff and up into process flow."

Click here to read John Pallattos commentary about BEAs AquaLogic strategy.

The last of the four new product lines is AquaLogic Security, which comes from the AquaLogic Security product line. This solution presents an SOA approach to securing applications, Roth said. Pricing for the security product starts at $75,000 for the administration application and $10,000 per CPU for security service modules, the company said.

Roth said BEA estimates that 80 percent of the time spent creating applications is spent on the actual development. The new BEA products will help enterprise customers cut down on development and coding.

Meanwhile, BEA officials said the other three product lines could include AquaLogic Process, for orchestration and management of disparate services; AquaLogic Portal; and AquaLogic Composer, a tool set for helping users compose applications.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis about productivity and business solutions.