BEA executives preach atop SOA 360 soapbox

BEA Systems on Wednesday continued to promote SOA 360, its newly announced SOA platform, at the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference. The company is making SOA, in which applications are offered as componentized services and combined for new applications, its focal point. BEA officials touted SOA 360, announced Tuesday and featuring BEA AquaLogic, WebLogic, and Tuxedo product lines, as well as a collaborative tooling environment called WorkSpace 360. Also critical to SOA 360 is BEA's microService Architecture (mSA), featuring the concept of a service network and notification services for publishing and discovering modular components.

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"BEA is taking SOA to its very core," said Paul Patrick, chief architect for BEA AquaLogic. "We're taking SOA into the heart of what we do [on] a day-to-day basis in the way we build products."

"Over 1,000 of our customers have SOA solutions in production," said Mark Carges, executive vice president of BEA's Business Interaction Division. BEA views business process management as a business driver for SOA, he said.

BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of World Wide Professional Services at BEA, cited six initiatives crucial to SOA:

* Defining and capturing benefits.

* Establishing an enterprise architecture.

* Making services engineering a discipline.

* Aligning the organization for shareholder value.

* Building a stream of connected projects.

* Connecting the business to the capability.

"If your company is going to be successful, we believe that these are things that you’re going to have to take on," Graham said. BEA in November plans to offer a series of service offerings providing guidance on service engineering, he said.

Even an attendee at the conference who is not currently using SOA was sold on the concept.

"I think we're headed in that direction," said Louis Leon, manager of Web services at a nonprofit organization, the name of which Leon preferred to keep anonymous. "It's an architectural strategy at this point."

SOA offers a more scalable alternative to point-to-point interfaces, Leon said.

Part of BEA's mSA plan involves modularizing BEA products, including its WebLogic Server Java application server. Functions of the application server such as its security apparatus could be separated from the core product and offered in a modular fashion, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. Asked when BEA would be announcing formal plans for modularizing the application server, Connell said, "Stay tuned."

BEA, meanwhile, is in discussions with a car company to service-enable cars with an in-vehicle application server for high-level automotive services, said Larry Cable, BEA chief architect for WebLogic. Possible applications emanating from this arrangement could include a system that generates e-mail notifications when a car's oil needs to be changed or an application notifying drivers of available parking spaces nearby, Cable said.

Also at the conference, Connell lauded an upcoming Evans Data survey that says WebLogic Server is the top choice for developers.