BEAS: BEA Announces Enterprise Integration Solution Portfolio Designed to Accelerate Adoption and Deployment of SOA

BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced a comprehensive enterprise integration strategy and solution portfolio that is designed to help customers realize the business benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) quickly and cost-effectively, regardless of where they are along the SOA adoption continuum.

BEA’s Enterprise Integration Portfolio is designed to provide a solution to put IT in the driver’s seat in integrating the services, applications and data that can reflect the business’s existing infrastructure investments, processes and objectives. Rather than weaving the enterprise into a packaged application’s view of the world or fusing the enterprise to a particular database or operating system, the BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio can deliver an extensible, adaptable and highly available service-oriented infrastructure designed to fluidly accommodate changing processes, resources and trading partners.

As part of the BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio, the company is rolling out the latest releases of BEA WebLogic® Integration (WLI) – a product designed to help customers successfully integrate and service-enable enterprise processes; and BEA AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) – a product designed to provide service mediation and management. BEA WLI Version 9.2 features several new functional and performance enhancements designed to help customers successfully and efficiently develop and achieve their integration goals including:

• An Eclipse-based development environment for ease of design and developer productivity;
• Controls that are compliant with the Apache Beehive project;
• Java annotations based on JSR-175 for standards-based code generation;
• Improved design-time experience, performance and usability for processes that span human and system resources; and
• New Worklist module with a drag-and-drop design environment, forms-based test console, and out-of-the-box portlets for user interaction to enable powerful exception management in fine-grained processes.

BEA ALSB 2.6 features several new enhancements designed to expand connectivity to a wide array of services, enhance standards support for messaging and provisioning, and provide additional configuration and deployment flexibility including:

• The ability to invoke a database lookup directly from ALSB to support message enrichment and validation scenarios;
• New features for customizing configuration scenarios and automating deployment including design-time APIs for configuration actions, support for rules-based deployments and support for much more extensive list of environment variables;
• Support for SOAP 1.2; and Support for SOAP 1.2; and
• Support for UDDI v3 automated import of business services to ensure that changes made in a business service registry, such as BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, are immediately reflected in the Service Bus.

The BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio is a key component of the BEA SOA 360 platform. Announced in September at BEAWorld 2006 in San Francisco, the BEA SOA 360 platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic®, Tuxedo and the company’s newly unveiled SOA collaborative tooling environment, BEA Workspace 360.

Additionally, BEA is bundling and making available for the first time WebLogic Integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. The combined offering, branded BEA AquaLogic Integrator, is designed to provide service-enabled process integration and service mediation in a single, powerful and cost-effective package that can give customers the tools needed to rapidly service enable and integrate business services in SOA with optimal performance and minimal change impact on service availability.

“BEA is firmly committed to helping businesses make the transition to SOA regardless of what underlying application infrastructure they have in place or where they are along the adoption lifecycle,” said Wai Wong, executive vice president, products, BEA Systems, Inc. “The BEA Enterprise Integration portfolio and the introduction of WebLogic Integration 9.2, AquaLogic Service Bus 2.6 and AquaLogic Integrator are designed to demonstrate our relentless focus on enabling integration the customer’s way and delivering rock-solid solutions that can help customers best achieve their SOA objectives.”

Availability
BEA WebLogic Integration 9.2 and AquaLogic Integrator will be available for download before year end at bea.com/weblogic BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.6 will be available for download in Q12007 at bea.com/aqualogic.