BEA Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced its BEA dev2dev Days tour, a global educational tour through which the company will target developers in the enterprise integration and Web services spaces.
The dev2dev Days tour will kick off in Boston and Rome Sept. 24, and will visit 11 cities in the United States, Europe and Asia, the company said.
BEAs dev2dev Days tour comes out of the companys dev2dev program, which is the San Jose, Calif., companys developer program that offers technical resources, training, support, education and peer networking for the BEA development community leveraging the BEA WebLogic Platform. BEA dev2dev includes a developer portal; events, developer conferences and seminars; books and other technical publications; user groups; and peer discussion forums.
In addition to focusing on BEAs technology, the tour will also feature technology from the tours sponsors, including Borland Software Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., Rational Software Corp., Sitraka Inc. and TogetherSoft Corp., all of which will provide information about incorporating their technologies in products based on the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform. Other sponsors of BEA dev2dev Days include Sys-Con Media Inc., publisher of the WebLogic Developers Journal, and SAMS Publishing, publisher of the new WebLogic Workshop Kick Start technical text.
When the company announced the dev2dev program last February, Tod Nielsen, BEAs chief marketing officer, said BEA had a goal of signing up 1 million developers to the program by the end of this year. BEA was unable to provide an accurate number of how many developers have signed up to its developer program to date, but analysts estimate the number to be closer to half a million.
“BEA definitely wants to play in the big leagues with IBM and Microsoft [Corp.], and theyve done a really good job of it so far,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Cambridge, Mass. “Both of the two titans have broad developer relations programs, so BEA has to devote the same kind of resources just to keep up. What I find most interesting about their strategy with the dev2dev program is that it looks like BEA considers Microsoft to be their biggest competitor for developer mind share, not IBM,” even though IBM—with its WebSphere platform—is the companys top competitor from a market perspective.