Intrigued by the creation of a new middleware company, I set up an interview with Bill Coleman, CEO of BEA Systems, way back in 1996. He and two colleagues, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang, had recently started a company by purchasing the rights to the Tuxedo transaction-processing software from Novell. A lot has changed since the days when middleware was the hot new software category and BEA was but an upstart. As recent events have shown, BEA is a full-fledged industry powerhouse intent on flexing its muscles. At its user conference next week, BEA in essence will cast itself as a soup-to-nuts platform provider with less baggage than the “big five” of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard. As detailed in our lead news story BEA pursues Java’s Holy Grail , BEA this week is releasing its WebLogic Workshop development tool and is repackaging its flagship J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application server WebLogic. BEA has been in the Java tools business for years, but the introduction of WebLogic Workshop (formerly code-named Cajun) represents a significant step toward rallying users around BEA and gaining greater independence from Java-standard steward Sun. Although BEA’s entire product line is built around Java and the J2EE application server standard, WebLogic Workshop shifts the development focus to XML Web services. This follows BEA’s leadership position along with Microsoft and IBM in championing the Web Services Interoperability Organization earlier this month. Sun, which has not joined that consortium, appears to be a step behind its peers in embracing a Web services-Java combination. BEA is looking to fill this leadership gap by taking a page out of Microsoft’s highly successfully playbook. Cajun and the associated developer programs are an effort to build the type of loyalty around BEA that Sun, which lives a double life of a software and hardware provider, struggles to do. The second reason that BEA is pushing hard for more developer loyalty is because application servers are becoming commodities. BEA can get a leg up on its competitors by tying the tools closely to the application server environment. As does Microsoft, BEA will seek to expose the complex functions of its operating environment, WebLogic, with relatively easy visual tools. And because Java compatibility across application servers and tools is not quite perfect, users have every reason to buy in to an app server-and-tool combination from a single vendor. For enterprises, the emergence of a truly powerful independent software player is a good thing. BEA has commodity software in mind — witness its deal last year with Intel to optimize its software for 64-bit computing. And it doesn’t have hardware or operating system sales coloring its product strategy. Does the industry need another BEA? Write to me at martin_lamonica@infoworld.com. Software Development