BEA Says It Leads in Service-Oriented Architecture

A day before IBM Corp. is set to make an announcement regarding its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy, BEA Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced that it, too, is in the game and has SOA products and capabilities.

San Jose, Calif.-based BEA said it is the only company fully equipped to deliver SOA solutions today. "While many talk about SOA being a future trend, BEA customers are already benefiting from SOA thanks to BEAs technology," a BEA representative said. IBM is slated to announce an SOA strategy Wednesday, sources said.

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BEAs SOA strategy is wrapped around the BEA WebLogic Platform. Company officials said only BEA has a unified, standards-based infrastructure, based on a common set of components—which can be reused across services and applications—that can quickly help customers build SOAs.

The company points to San Diego-based Accredited Home Lenders Inc., which used BEAs WebLogic Enterprise Platform 8.1 and accompanying tools to implement a service-oriented architecture for mortgage banking, as an example of its success in the SOA space.

In a recent interview with eWEEK, BEA chief executive Alfred Chuang said, "BEA is the only company qualified to deliver SOA today; nobody else can say that."

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC of Waltham, Mass., took exception with that position. "BEAs SOA vision is very platform-centric," Bloomberg said. "By this, we mean that you can build an SOA with WebLogic, but WebLogic must be the crux or centerpiece of the SOA.

"Contrast this view with the purer ESB [Enterprise Service Bus] views of companies like Sonic [Software Corp.] or Fiorano [Software Inc.], and its not at all clear that BEAs approach is necessarily the best on the market for building SOAs."

Click here to read about BEAs efforts in the ESB space.

BEA officials also said the company will unveil Project Sierra at its eWorld conference next month. A company statement on Project Sierra, the code name for an SOA-based initiative BEA has been working on, said: "In a nutshell, Project Sierra is about redefining the economics of IT. If it takes months to do something today, BEA is going to take that down to minutes in the future."

On Monday, Detroit-based Compuware Corp. announced the availability of Compuware Uniface 8.4, an integrated development environment for building and deploying applications in an SOA environment. Uniface lets developers build reusable services and features Web services call-out capability that enables Uniface applications also to consume Web services, the company said.

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