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Systems/Enterprise:

BEA AIMS TO IMPROVE RESPONSIVENESS FROM 'MONTHS TO MINUTES'

At its ninth annual technology conference, BEA Systems Inc introduced new products and services that support Liquid Computing -- BEA's vision of a fluid enterprise that can change IT responsiveness from "month to minutes." Formerly code-named Project Sierra, Liquid Computing builds upon a Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundation, with the ultimate objective of aligning every enterprise interaction with real-time business goals to help companies become service-driven enterprises, ultimately achieving enterprise compatibility, active adaptability and breakthrough productivity.

The new technology, BEA WebLogic Server Process Edition features the industry-leading application server and critical features of WebLogic Integration Server to help companies quickly and affordably build SOAs. Converging the capabilities of application development and Business Process Management (BPM), WebLogic Server Process Edition allows J2EE developers leverage powerful BPM tools and frameworks to build complex business solutions in a shorter amount of time.

During eWorld, BEA will also be offering sneak peeks of Project Alchemy, which addresses the mobile aspect of Liquid Computing, and Project QuickSilver-an innovative, XML-based technology that uniquely converges the powerful capabilities of an enterprise service bus with Web services management.

"BEA's heritage is innovating on behalf of our customers, always with the goal of reducing complexity and costs. While we've made dramatic inroads to date, we want to further improve business efficiency with Liquid Computing," said Alfred Chuang, founder, chairman and CEO of BEA Systems. "Liquid Computing redefines the economics and responsiveness of IT. It is every CIO aligning every enterprise interaction with up-to-the minute business goals in not months, but minutes."

According to industry analyst firm Gartner Group, by 2008 more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as the "guiding principle" when creating mission-critical applications and processes. Gartner analyst Yafim Natis has reiterated the importance of SOAs in enterprises by stating that business that ignore the potential of SOA will find themselves outpaced by rivals who improve their agility and transform themselves into new kinds of enterprises.

BEA is in the unique position to help companies reduce IT complexity and costs through a service-oriented architecture, and eventually achieving the vision of Liquid Computing. The new technologies and services can help companies achieve the three pillars of Liquid Computing: enterprise compatibility, active adaptability and breakthrough productivity.

Enterprise Compatibility

Liquid Computing leverages BEA's model of interoperability over integration to deliver an incomparable level of compatibility to the entire enterprise. BEA will deliver Web service-oriented and cross-platform products beyond Java and the BEA WebLogic Platform with technologies like Project QuickSilver in order to bring BEA's trusted innovations to customers who want to ensure that Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, legacy and other platforms interoperate seamlessly and transparently. This enhanced communication between previously incompatible, isolated systems can lead to the delivery of accurate, real-time information so enterprises can make rapid and informed business decisions.

Active Adaptability

BEA has a rich tradition of helping enterprises be interoperable, which will provide a foundation for delivering active adaptability. BEA was among the first companies to offer a robust application server that leveraged clustering technology to distribute business logic over multiple machines while ensuring one machine's failure will not shut down the system. BEA further improved upon adaptability with BEA WebLogic Platform, which provided a unified approach to allow customers to easily make a change to an application, or integrate a new application, without disrupting the entire system. Liquid Computing is about helping customers achieve active adaptability, creating dynamic and fluid systems that are self-aware and even self-healing so customers can focus less time on IT maintenance and more time on rolling out services that drive competitive advantage.

Breakthrough Productivity

BEA delivered unprecedented levels of productivity to a mass market of developers with BEA WebLogic Workshop and plans to continue to offer innovations as illustrated in Project Alchemy, to a wider audience including business analysts, to drive faster business results. As part of the Liquid Computing vision, line-of-business managers can use business authoring tools to directly create and modify solutions at the speed of business, while IT maintains overall systems governance and control. For example, entry-level designers will be able to use simple scripting to create Web and mobile applications and administrators will be able to use intuitive Web sites in order to optimize and change business solutions.

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