BEAWorld Shanghai: BEA Rebuilds Positive Momentum with Bevy of Product Updates

| Dec 14, 2007 | Application Infrastructure | Show Update
| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: Very High
Market Impact: High

Event Summary

December 12, 2007 -- At BEAWorld Shanghai, BEA Systems announced that it will deliver an open, enterprise-grade, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform in Q2 2008 as phase one of Project Genesis. The firm also announced that its BEA Guardian 1.0 product is now available free of charge to all BEA customers and that it has updated AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0, AquaLogic Enterprise Security 3.0, AquaLogic Data Services Platform 3.0, WebLogic Integration 10.2, and AquaLogic Integrator 3.0.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on BEA for making a very large array of product announcements at BEAWorld Shanghai, because with updates spanning both AquaLogic and WebLogic product lines, BEA has focused on increased Eclipse tooling, cross-product integration, pro-active management and monitoring, and multi-domain service-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement. The firm’s biggest news, however, stemmed from announcements surrounding Project Genesis, which has finally taken on a tangible form with distinct products and schedules.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to BEA for two reasons; first, the firm desperately needed to show forward technical momentum in the wake of Oracle’s failed acquisition attempt, which left a wake of instability surrounding the company’s future. Second, BEA needed to deliver something tangible on its sweeping Project Genesis, which the company announced last fall. The announcements delivered at BEAWorld Shanghai fulfill both needs admirably, though Project Genesis is not being marketed to enterprise customers aggressively.

• Market Impact: High on the SOA market, as the announcements made by BEA go beyond simple product updates that follow market trends. The firm’s renewed commitment to its innovative management solution (Guardian), advantageous product parings (process management and integration), and enterprise service bus (ESB) innovations serve as differentiators and underscore BEA’s continued relevance within the marketplace.

Competitive Concerns

• BEA has helped Project Genesis off to a solid and well-defined start with a software platform that directly enables SaaS application deployment. While this certainly represents a lucrative and rapidly growing market space, BEA’s stated focus on ISVs leaves the impression that enterprise customers are being left out of the loop for phase one. Certainly, ISVs are important in this equation, but BEA has not promoted the fact that phase one products can be employed by enterprise customers as well.

• BEA markets the combination of its products as being greater than the sum of their parts, as with the cross-product integration and communication between AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic BPM Suite, and WebLogic Integration. However, BEA does not offer these products as a bundled suite under a single installation, configuration, and management/monitoring tool. In addition, BEA is still building out a unified SOA UI under its WorkSpace 360 initiative, leaving these products as disparate but well-integrated point solutions, not as use case-centric, horizontal offerings.

• BEA has made positive strides in rolling out WorkSpace 360 with its release of AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0 this September. The company has demonstrated this solution since that time as well. However, given BEA’s initial roadmap for WorkSpace 360, which was unveiled in September 2006 with a release date of 2007, the company faces some stiff competition from its competitive set (including Sun, TIBCO, Progress, and IBM), all of which have begun shipping roll-driven, unified development, modeling, composition, and even optimization tools.

• While BEA has achieved very positive momentum for its pro-active monitoring and management solution, Guardian, publishing 1,604 problem signatures since coming on line last year. However, Guardian does not cover the entire BEA product portfolio. Presently, this solution only supports WebLogic Portal, AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic Data Services Platform, and WebLogic SIP/RFID Server. IT does not yet support key products such as WebLogic BPM Suite, AquaLogic User Interaction, or AquaLogic Integrator. In addition, BEA announced only one bundle for Guardian (with BEA WebLogic Server).

• Even though there are a very large number of product updates announced at BEAWorld in Shanghai, only two products were released in conjunction with these announcements: Eclipse tooling for WebLogic Event Server and AquaLogic Enterprise Security 3.0. All other product updates are scheduled to reach general availability in either Q1 or Q2 2008.

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Current Perspective

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