BEAS: BEA Systems Extends Portal Leadership Role and Innovation for Business-Oriented Portals With Release of New Products

BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today further extended its position as the one of the industry’s top providers of cross-platform, business-oriented portal infrastructure with the introduction of two new products and a series of updates to its AquaLogic User Interaction product line. The releases are designed to help companies innovate faster by extending portal capabilities to a broader set of participants, helping to improve the scalability, reliability and manageability for IT and administrators by providing developers with tools which can break-down barriers imposed by different development languages and application frameworks. The releases are also designed to help customers realize new levels of interoperability between JEE and .NET and increase the reuse of existing systems within new business solutions.

BEA introduced AquaLogic Interaction Grid Search, a new product available in the AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) product line that is designed to be a scalable and reliable search infrastructure for portal deployments and portal-based application development. Additionally, BEA announced the availability of a second new product, AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator, which is designed to help customers integrate new or existing Microsoft ASP.NET applications and services into portals powered by both BEA AquaLogic Interaction (ALI) or BEA WebLogic Portal (WLP), as well as third-party Java-portals. New updates in the ALUI family include AquaLogic Interaction, AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration and AquaLogic Interaction Analytics.

AquaLogic User Interaction is a key component of the BEA SOA 360º platform. BEA SOA 360º is designed to be the industry’s most unified Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform for business transformation and optimization and to help to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams. It spans the three of BEA’s product families, BEA AquaLogic, BEA WebLogic, and BEA Tuxedo. BEA SOA 360º is built on the native SOA microService Architecture (mSA) and is supported by BEA WorkSpace 360º - the industry’s first unified collaborative tooling environment to put business and IT at the same table.

AquaLogic Grid Search: Limitlessly Expanding Search

Search is a central service for portals focused on simplifying the discovery of information and demands on search infrastructure is increasing exponentially as the volume of content and users within portals grow. Deeply integrated with the entire AquaLogic User Interaction product line, the new AquaLogic Interaction Grid Search is designed to enable portal customers to limitlessly expand their search capabilities on four fronts – scalability, reliability, manageability and performance – while improving the search experience of users and helping IT to easily manage and maintain search collections containing millions of documents. The new AquaLogic Interaction Grid Search is designed to help customers to easily improve their existing search capabilities by unifying search across unstructured content sources, collaborative documents, Web content, communities, users and portal objects.

“The volume of unstructured content accessible through our MyAflac.com portal is constantly expanding. With massive search collections containing hundreds of thousands of documents, de-normalized data and multi-media, we need a cost effective way to provide a high-performance and scalable search capability that’s easy to manage and administer and respects the source repository's security” said Frank Braski, Manager of High Performance Workplaces at Aflac. “With BEA’s new AquaLogic Grid Search, we now have an integrated search technology that is designed to allow us to partition our search collection across multiple, inexpensive commodity servers for highly scalable and reliable information discovery in our large portal deployment. By finding and accessing the right enterprise information more quickly and easily, we ultimately improve our employees’ productivity and collaboration as well as increase the adoption of our portal.”

For more information about AquaLogic Interaction Grid Search, please visit www.bea.com/search

BEA AquaLogic User Interaction: Broadening Collaboration

The new ALUI product upgrades are designed to help customers achieve richer usability for building and managing collaborative processes and Web applications and increase customer freedom through broader platform support. The three new updates in the BEA AquaLogic User Interaction product line are:

• AquaLogic Interaction 6.1 is a new version of BEA’s cross-platform portal product. New features include support for additional application servers, operating systems and databases, such as BEA WebLogic Server 9, Solaris 10, SQL Server 2005, Oracle RAC 10G R2; enhancements to integrated search and knowledge management capabilities and faster page delivery;

• BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration 4.2 is an update designed to help users collaborate more efficiently through simplified document sharing, project management, online discussions, group calendars and notifications. New features include out-of-the-box integration with AquaLogic BPM for collaborative business processes and enhanced usability and support for AquaLogic Interaction Grid Search;

• BEA AquaLogic Interaction Analytics 2.0 is the next major release of usage tracking and measurement system that delivers comprehensive reporting on activity and content usage within portals and composite applications deployed using AquaLogic Interaction. New features include greater extensibility through remote APIs to track custom event and objects, additional out-of-the-box reports for reporting on extended search, collaboration and content publishing events and expanded security and management tools for distributed reporting capabilities to broader audiences

For more information about BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, please visit www.bea.com/alui

BEA AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator: Empowering the .NET Developer

BEA also announced today the availability of BEA AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator, which is designed to enable developers to integrate new or existing ASP.NET applications and services in both the AquaLogic Interaction and WebLogic Portal products and in third-party Java portals. Using the toolkit, an ASP.NET developer can build and expose applications via the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard in both BEA AquaLogic Interaction and BEA WebLogic Portal or any WSRP compliant portal server. The BEA AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator supports ASP.NET 2.0 portlet authoring and helps to provide ease-of-development APIs for rapid and simple development of rich portlet content.

This new product is designed to help enable organizations more readily incorporate .NET applications and services, either developed organically, available through partners or added through acquisition, into a more powerful portal framework and provide additional interoperability between the AquaLogic Interaction and WebLogic Portal products through the WSRP standard. As a result, BEA customers have a tool that is designed to help build applications faster and at lower cost, helping leverage investments made in a broader service-oriented architecture. For more information, please visit www.bea.com/dotnet