BEA to lay out application server road map

February 19, 1999 — BEA Systems at its user conference next week in New Orleans will outline the road map for the BEA WebLogic application server, including the integration with BEA’s M3 middleware and the bundling of third-party application integration products with BEA technology.

Through its acquisition last year of WebLogic, BEA received one of the best run times for the Java Programming Environment, a set of 12 Java-based technologies and services that includes Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of BEA in Sunnyvale, Calif.

With next week’s announcement, the run time has been joined by BEA’s M3 middleware platform and object request broker in the high-end WebLogic Enterprise Server. With its general availability, late in the third quarter, BEA will drop the M3 brand, Coleman said.

The server will feature object clusters, systems failover, M3’s transaction monitoring, and both CORBA and Component Object Model support. A version for developers will arrive in the second quarter.

“Our comparisons show that IBM and Sun’s products will fall into the lower half of the performance of our Enterprise Server product,” Coleman said. “We can do far more EJB invocations per second. No product will match our Enterprise product for two years on scaling, reliability, and security.”

BEA also will deliver the WebLogic Express version for lower-end Java servlets and Java Database Connectivity in the second quarter, and the mid-range WebLogic Server, which is now shipping, for transaction monitoring, clustering, and application integration.

BEA will also this year broaden its tools with BEA Builder for M3 and BEA Builder for WebLogic, which will augment standard Java EDIs, such as Symantec’s Visual Café, Coleman said.

Lastly, BEA next week will announce the eLink family of bundled products designed to foster application integration in specialized vertical markets through BEA technology and licensing deals with TSI International Software of Wilton, Conn., and InConcert, of Boston, said Mark Bowles, vice president of enterprise integration at BEA.

Due to ship in the first half of 1999, pricing for eLink for Commerce (with InConcert products) will start at 70,000, depending on configuration, and will bring business process engineering rules across disparate systems and applications.

TSI’s Mercator will be bundled with BEA platforms to target enterprise resource planning translation and integration for SAP R3 and other resource systems in eLink for R3, which is now shipping.

BEA said it expects to lure other partners to broaden its application integration reach into other vertical markets in coming months.