BEA Shares Fall Amid Speculation About Company’s Future

“AquaLogic is driving key SOA wins in competitors’ accounts, because AquaLogic can seamlessly co-exist with our customers’ existing systems and because customers’ own benchmarks demonstrate that AquaLogic delivers the goods,” BEA CEO Alfred Chuang said in a statement.

But analyst Ron Schmelzer of SOA research firm ZapThink said he doesn’t see BEA emerging as an SOA leader. IBM has been the most dominant player in winning market share for its SOA middleware, and Oracle and SAP are leveraging their large base of applications customers to build their SOA presence, he said.

“BEA has not been as successful. I think we see BEA less day-to-day than we did in the Web 1.0 days,” Schmelzer said. “They made some acquisitions — Fuego and Flashline — that weren’t really SOA-oriented. Their message is somehow getting buried.”

Read more at: CRN

BEA Acquires Fuego

The move is important because it underlines BEA’s effort to port its success from application infrastructure (in which space, along with IBM, it is one of the two big names) to the SOA world, where its strategy centers around the AquaLogic product. “BPM was one of the pieces BEA was missing in AquaLogic,” says ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.

While Fuego does address the BPM component of SOA, Bloomberg is concerned about how its Java-based approach will fit in with AquaLogic. “If you’re neutral with respect to the underlying code rather than having a Java infrastructure, you have flexibility at runtime, you can make changes to business logic on the fly,” he explains. “The power of the SOA view of BPM is that you don’t need to get developers to generate Java code and recompile when you’re making new processes, or changes to processes.”

On the whole, though. Bloomberg is a believer in BEA’s direction. “They have the right strategy,” he concludes.

Read more at: Line56

BEA Warms to BPM With Fuego Buy

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said acquiring a BPM company like Fuego makes a lot of sense because BEA’s existing process tooling wasn’t particularly suited for service orientation, the bedrock of AquaLogic.

“Perhaps the greatest challenge that BEA will have when integrating Fuego into Aqualogic is that Fuego takes a code-generation approach to BPM, which fundamentally isn’t service-oriented,” Bloomberg said.

“As a result, BEA has some work to do to make sure the Fuego technology fits into the service infrastructure (i.e. Aqualogic) rather than the application infrastructure (WebLogic).”

Read more at: InternetNews

BEA Systems Buys Software Maker Fuego

Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said the acquisition made sense because BEA’s existing tools for business process management did not provide strong support for SOAs.

“Their existing process tooling wasn’t particularly service-oriented, and service-oriented processes are clearly on the AquaLogic roadmap,” Bloomberg said in an email.

The problem BEA will face in integrating Fuego into Aqualogic will be in taking the latter company’s code-generating approach to business process management and make it work in the BEA product.

“BEA has some work to do to make sure the Fuego technology fits into the Aqualogic service infrastructure,” the analyst said.

A plus, however, is that both companies’ technologies are “firmly in the Java camp,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: TechWeb

BEA Buys Fuego for $87.5 Million

However, Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, said, “It’s clear that business process is a key part to making composite services in an SOA work. Indeed, you can’t do service composition without business process. As such, acquiring a BPM company like Fuego makes a lot of sense for BEA, given that their existing process tooling wasn’t particularly service-oriented, and service-oriented process is clearly a key element of the AquaLogic roadmap.”

Read more at: eWeek

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Overview of Web Services Management

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Service-Oriented Process

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Service-Oriented Process to Cannibalize Integrators

As Web services support for business processes matures, companies may be able to throw out expensive and complicated integration systems through a “Service-Oriented Process” approach, according to a new report by XML research firm ZapThink.
“A process is a set of activities that are linked together into a logical flow that meets business requirements,” Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink co-founder and senior analyst, told internetnews.com.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.