With its AquaLogic
product line, BEA Systems is reaching out to an influencial new audience, application
architects and corporate business strategists, who may keep BEA growing for
years to come if they buy into its pitch.
There's been
ceaseless debate and conjecture about whether BEA Systems is in danger of
sinking into technological irrelevance. There has been talk of BEA being
marginalized in its core WebLogic application service market and levered out of
its position in the enterprise Web services software stack by competition from
Oracle, IBM and the open-source Apache Software Foundation.
Along with the
industry chatter, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
has been taunting BEA with his company's claims that the Oracle 10g application
server is stealing market share from the BEA server.
If that wasn't enough, BEA has been
dogged by rumors that it is Oracle's next big buyout target. That rumor was
stirred up yet again this week even as BEA executives appeared at the NASDAQ
MarketSite in New York's Time Square Thursday to take the wraps off its
"AquaLogic" SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy. BEA officials declined
to comment on the rumor Thursday.
But with its AquaLogic strategy BEA has
an opportunity to develop an entirely new market that has the potential to
support the company's growth for years to come, if it successfully carries out
what it described as a three-year product development and marketing strategy.
AquaLogic is at the core of what BEA is
calling its "Enterprise Liquid Assets" vision, which will provide SOA technology
to enable enterprises to use the Internet to integrate information assets that
have been locked away in heretofore isolated data caches.
Click here to read about the release of
a BEA tool that helps IT organizations assess whether they are ready to
implement SOA.
For years BEA has
been talking mainly to application developers and software engineers who use
Java or
Microsoft
.Net
programming tools to build
e-commerce applications that run on its WebLogic application server.
With the new AquaLogic product family,
BEA is talking to the software developers' bosses, the application architects,
business analysts and even the CIOs who are taking a strong interest in SOA,
which is being heavily promoted not just by BEA, but by the likes of IBM,
Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems.
With this new technology initiative, it
doesn't matter whether WebLogic or the application servers from IBM, Oracle and
Apache become increasingly commoditized. That's because corporate IT departments
are interested in investing in SOA technology because it promises to provide
greater integration for the data assets and systems they already own.
IT managers are counting on SOA to let
them use Web service technology to access data assets across multiple databases
used by different corporate departments and divisions. BEA claims that SOA has
the potential to "overcome a multibillion-dollar problem of integrating
different types of systems and respond faster to the pace of modern business."
But this all sounds too familiar. It
seems the same promises were made when Java 2 Enterprise Edition and the Web
services concept were first introduced. Every new wave of IT technology promises
to make it easier for heterogeneous computer systems to share information, while
greatly simplifying the software production process and slashing IT expenses.
SOA might actually deliver these
promised gains in data accessibility. But the key will be for BEA and the rest
of these industry powerhouses to deliver real products that IT departments can
productively deploy over the next couple of years.
The AquaLogic product line is a good
initiative for BEA because it is moving into a "large sustainable market" that
is going to grow for years to come, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with
ZapThink LLC, an IT analysis and consulting firm that specializes in Web
services and SOA. In its announcement Thursday, BEA cited IDC estimates that
sales of SOA-related software products will grow to more than $9 billion with a
compound annual growth rate of 75 percent.
It's an important development,
Schmelzer said, that BEA is able to branch out to tell its AquaLogic story to
application architects and business strategists, not just to the Java
developers. "It is good for them in the long term to be trying to focus on the
people who are trying to build heterogeneous systems," Schmelzer said, because
this is where the most potential growth and customer benefits are going to come
from.
As for the latest Oracle buyout latest
rumor, Schmelzer says it doesn't seem credible because Oracle has yet to
articulate its own coherent SOA strategy, even as it has acquired companies that
might provide components of such a strategy.
"Oracle has been known to make
aggressive offers," even in the face of indifference and hostility from its
buyout targets, Schmelzer noted. "But I think [an Oracle buyout] would be a
mistake" because BEA's technology "will just get lost" in the maze of Oracle's
product line, he said.
"Who knows what Oracle's SOA strategy
is? It looks like they bought a bunch of stuff and are slapping it together," he
said. It's as if Oracle is "hoping that if they acquire enough stuff if will
form itself into some kind of strategy," Schmelzer said.
Regardless of this gratuitous
distraction, with its Liquid Assets strategy BEA is exerting a sustained effort
to extend its product line in ways that will ensure that it won't be mistaken
for just another application server vendor.
