BEA Systems is expected to tout its strategy for
services-oriented architectures at its BEA eWorld 2004 show in San
Francisco next week.
While company officials this week have declined to comment,
officials previously have acknowledged plans to make a concerted
push into SOAs, using BEA’s WebLogic Platform and its Project
Sierra strategy for tools. Recent information posted on the
company’s website provides insights into BEA’s thinking on
SOAs.
“Sharing of services is central to the SOA approach,” said
BEA chief information officer Rhonda Hocker. “The ability to
rapidly assemble applications or orchestrate processes is based
upon the ready availability of some services that can be shared.
Sharing of resources by definition requires governance."
Hocker added that switching to SOA will require a significant
shift in development style, with a focus on code reuse, noting
that SOA interfaces are based on web services and XML.
Java also is on BEA’s SOA to-do list, although BEA acknowledges
Java as just one way to implement services.
“Java is important as the most prevalent programming standard
for implementing services” said Hocker. “The scale and skills of
the Java community guarantee that plenty of high quality skills
will be available to build SOAs.”
An enterprise service bus, which would provide messaging
services in an SOA, is likely to be part of BEA’s plan as well.
Hewlett-Packard will be prominent at eWorld, focusing on SOAs as
well as on “business agility. Knowledge network provider The
Middleware Company, for its part, says it will, in conjunction with
BEA, unveil technologies and resources to assist developers in
building SOAs and service-oriented applications.
BEA must play in the SOA game because customers are latching
onto the concept, seeking to expose applications as services as
opposed to using proprietary, synchronous connections, said Shawn
Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “Almost all
enterprise customers say this is a direction they want to go.”
The company’s SOA strategy will accommodate other suppliers’
technologies, according to Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at
ZapThink.
“First, they are really shifting their strategy from a story
that SOAs will be running on the BEA system to the opposite - BEA
systems running on SOAs that might or might not be BEA-based,”
Schmelzer said.
“As a result, the company will be seeking to integrate with
systems that are non-BEA-based and extending the WebLogic value
proposition to non-developers.”
BEA’s recent financial reports indicate the company may need to
diversify its revenue sources. While the company reported total
revenues of $262.6m for the quarter ending 30 April, an increase of
11% from the same quarter of last year, licence revenues were down
2%, to $120.2m, from the same period a year ago.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld