Integrated Development

Enterprise integration and application development form tighter convergence

At its eighth annual technology conference, BEA Systems Inc. unveiled new products and services targeting a major headache — enterprise integration. Its new product roadmap converges application development and integration into a single infrastructure, via BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1. But BEA has a fight on its hands as heavyweights IBM and Sun Microsystems head in the same direction.

Amid tightening IT budgets, integration projects remain on many corporate to-do lists as part of their strategy of leveraging existing assets. Despite this area of growth, many analysts predict a shakeout will occur among current enterprise application integration vendors — Tibco, SeeBeyond, and Vitria. Customers are turning away from point-to-point integration strategies, which have proven overly expensive and complex in the past, toward a unified, multiproduct, standards-based approach.

BEA is trumpeting this approach in an effort to grow new revenue streams, not to mention defend its core application server business from increasing competition — most notably IBM (a close second according to the latest Gartner findings), which made integration announcements timed to coincide with BEA's conference.

BEA announced a beta version of the WebLogic 8.1 platform, including new versions of its app server (WebLogic Server 8.1) and Java virtual machine (Jrockit), its enterprise portal (WebLogic Portal 8.1) and application development framework (WebLogic Workshop 8.1), and its integration solution (WebLogic Integration). With this new convergence approach, it claims that customers can benefit from an industrial-strength architecture that's easier to use and delivers value much faster.

According to Mike Gilpin, research fellow at Giga Information Group Inc., "Whereas integration tools are historically separate from integrated application development environments, converging integration tools into the same environments will make it much easier for those doing both development and integration to conduct those activities within a single coherently managed life cycle, producing a more coherently managed set of deliverables."

But BEA still has some convincing to do. According to IDC, BEA claimed less than 2 percent of the $1.9 billion integration market in contrast to IBM's 12.5 percent. And while BEA has been pointing to its unified platform as a decided advantage to IBM's complexity, IBM announced significant enhancements to its WebSphere Business Integration software portfolio, which will include the modeling and monitoring assets of its Holosfx acquisition to let users model, identify, analyze, and simulate business processes.

In addition to stiff competition from IBM, BEA faces a challenge from its longtime partner, Sun Microsystems: The majority of BEA's license sales have been for computers that run Sun's Solaris OS. And Sun, facing battles of its own, is trying to get that business back: Sun bundles directory and app server software in Solaris and announced plans to add portal, instant-messaging, and possibly integration software by year's end.

Alfred Chuang, BEA's CEO, is confident that BEA will emerge victorious. He says that this new direction for BEA stems from customer requests for a unified environment for integration and development.

— Michelle Young

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