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BEA Systems Inc.s most recent customer win for its WebLogic Integration 8.1 product is significant not so much in the win itself, but in the types of companies and products BEA was up against.
The San Jose, Calif., company on Tuesday will announce that Toyota Australia, which has been part of the beta program for WebLogic Integration 8.1, has licensed the product to be the core of its eBusiness Transformation Program, a large IT integration program Toyota has going in Australia. The program is an effort to integrate Toyotas systems with those of the companys trading partners.
BEA has been promoting a corporate strategy of combining development and integration to help solve customer IT problems in the world of Web services. BEA officials said Toyota selected its offerings on that very issue. In fact, officials said the company beat out six competitors— webMethods Inc., IBM, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Vitria Technology Inc., TIBCO Software Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd.—to win the Toyota business.
“The fact that BEA is now competing with EAI and traditional integration companies is definitely proof that BEA is trying to work their way up the application stack and is competing less on app servers and more on the applications that run on app servers—in particular, integration tools,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm.
BEA officials said Toyota initially sought to use webMethods technology, but that the webMethods solution did not pass muster and the company decided to go with BEAs WebLogic solution instead.
Toyota is delivering new projects based on BEAs WebLogic Enterprise Platform, according to BEA, and the automaker has delivered several projects already using WebLogic, including a fleet management system, proof of delivery system and others.
Meanwhile, on Monday BEA announced consulting, education and support services to support the BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1. The services include BEA Business Integration Assessment, for assessing users needs in integration situations; BEA Adapters for Business Integration, including reusable adapters; and BEA Business Integration best practices, including BEAs SteelThreads methodology that features architectural patterns and solution templates, the company said.