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NEW YORK—With a new brand identity, a new vision and a new product line, BEA Systems Inc. Thursday is expected to announce its re-emergence in the service-oriented architecture space.
BEA plans to unveil its new Enterprise Liquid Assets vision at an event at the NASDAQ MarketSite here.
Along with this new vision, BEA will introduce four new products in three categories.
The San Jose, Calif., company will roll out its new BEA AquaLogic family of products, aimed at addressing what BEA refers to as the service infrastructure space. Bill Roth, vice president of product management at BEA, said the service infrastructure space is an emerging category of enterprise software that is estimated to grow to $9 billion by 2009.
Roth said the AquaLogic line would complement but not replace the companys WebLogic line of tools for building applications. WebLogic is aimed at developers, but AquaLogic is aimed at application specialists, IT professionals and business analysts and architects. Roth said.
In all, the BEA AquaLogic vision will consist of six product lines—three of which are to be announced Thursday—along with four new products.
The first product line is the BEA AquaLogic Messaging product line, with the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus as its first product. The BEA AquaLogic Service Bus was formerly code-named Quicksilver, and it is BEAs solution to integrate ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and Web Services management capabilities. BEA AquaLogic Service Bus will be available in summer 2005 for around $45,000 per CPU.
The second new product, the BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, is a business services registry, which provides a foundation for SOA governance and lifecycle management. The product supports the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) version 3 specification. The BEA AquaLogic Service Registry also delivers lifecycle management capabilities, Roth said.
BEA also will announce the BEA AquaLogic Data product line and the new BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, which was formerly known as Liquid Data. The BEA 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 BEA developed in conjunction with IBM. The product will be available later this month for about $10,000 per CPU.
Finally, BEA will introduce the BEA AquaLogic Security product line and the BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security solution, which was formerly known as WebLogic Enterprise Security. This solution presents a service-oriented approach to securing applications, Roth said. “This allows security to be treated as a service in an SOA,” Roth said.
Pricing for the security solution starts at $75,000 for the administration application and 10,000 per CPU for security service modules, company officials said.
Meanwhile, BEA officials said the other three product lines could include BEA AquaLogic Process for orchestration and management of disparate services; BEA AquaLogic Portal; and BEA AquaLogic Composer, a tool set for helping users compose applications.
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, particularly in integration efforts, where users will be able to “create business flow between applications.”
This move into new product lines also signals a move beyond simply Java for BEA, and toward greater support for XML and the WS-* stack of Web services specifications, company officials said.
In that regard, BEA and Microsoft Corp. are expected to announce a partnership to promote further interoperability around the Web services standards.
Meanwhile, with its new vision, BEA has re-branded the company, Roth said, delivering a whole new Web site along with a new tagline: Think Liquid.
BEA also trotted out other tag phrases, such as “frozen assets become liquid,” with AquaLogic, and “code once, leverage anywhere,” or COLA.
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