BEA chief talks SOAs, open source

BEA Systems Inc. is holding its yearly eWorld user conference in San Francisco this week and its message to customers is echoing loud and clear from virtually every banner and every marketing brochure: "Deploy SOA. Now."

SOA, or a services-oriented architecture, is a design approach to IT that proponents say makes it easier to adapt computer systems to changing business needs. It can also help reduce application development costs by allowing for greater reuse of software code, its boosters say.

The approach uses Web services standards to "expose" applications as services that can be reused across an organization. A service might be a program for authenticating users, a business function such as "update this customer's order status," or virtually anything else that can be expressed in software.

BEA announced some new products this week that it hopes will help distinguish it from rivals such as IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Oracle Corp., who are also singing the SOA tune. The products include Quicksilver, BEA's take on an enterprise service bus, used for shuttling messages around an IT infrastructure.

Alfred Chuang, BEA's chairman and chief executive, talked to IDG News Service about the new products, as well as BEA's longer term growth plans and its views on opening the source code to more of its products. Following is an edited transcript:

IDG News Service: What role will Quicksilver play in helping companies build an SOA?

Chuang: Our current technology is really a platform for people to build applications in an SOA manner and deploy them. Quicksilver will help people take applications that are not even built in the SOA model and allow them to present themselves and be used in an SOA environment. So let's say I'm building a banking application, I have a lot of old stuff running on mainframes, I may have a two-tier Oracle application -- how do I make these things usable in an SOA environment and send them out to end users who they were never designed for?

An SOA platform will allow people to do that and, especially if you use our server technologies, Quicksilver will be a bus that allows things to be plugged into it, and they will look very natural to the new SOA-type applications.

IDGNS: In the past, BEA has sold products primarily for developing and deploying Java applications, and now you're talking about reaching out to other platforms, even mainframes. Do you see a broader role for BEA in the enterprise IT environment?

Chuang: People don't really build stand-alone applications any more, if you do you just add more complexity to your environment. So there's a lot more integration going on, and that has led to BEA becoming a multi-product company. And other people's technology has to fit very tightly into the environment, that's not something we can control.

WebLogic Platform 8.1 (released in mid-2003) was the first convergence of our app server, our portal server and our integration server. Quicksilver is really a bus that even a whole platform could plug into, so it will be more independent of our own technology than anything else we have. That will allow different point technologies to use it for management, for spooling messages, all that kind of stuff.