Service provisioning and routing would be key in company’s Diamond platform BEA Systems with its upcoming Diamond application deployment platform envisions an IT person taking on the new role of “application configurator” in SOAs (service-oriented architectures).The application configurator would understand the services of applications and change metadata to enable routing of services to the right person. For instance, the configurator might define rules related to routing of purchase orders based on the level of customer, according to Vittorio Viarengo, BEA vice president of product strategy and product management. Or, specific types of users could be mapped to specific roles, he said.A major component of Diamond will be QuickSilver, which will act as a proxy and converge ESB and Web services management capabilities, Viarengo said. QuickSilver would be the tool to route purchase orders, for example. BEA is conducting briefings on Diamond and QuickSilver this week. Diamond is due to ship in 2005, with a beta version set for release between now and January, according to BEA this week. But BEA in May had said the platform would ship in the summer of 2005, which means the broader 2005 shipping target could have Diamond shipping as much as three months later than was planned or possibly earlier than the original timeframe. BEA is maintaining that Diamond has remained on track to ship on time.QuickSilver for the time being, at least, gives BEA a leg up on IBM in managing multi-platform services, said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “I wouldn’t be surprised that by the time this is being shipped that IBM has something in place” to rival it, Willett said.QuickSilver may become part of the BEA application server but the company has not finalized packaging details yet, Viarengo said. A key feature of QuickSilver will be its ability to include legacy technologies such as MQSeries or Tibco in SOAs. “You’re basically bridging the old world with the new SOA world,” said Viarengo.“In QuickSilver, we change the design fulcrum, the design center, and we said, let’s start from the heterogeneous enterprise and let’s look at the challenge that companies will have in managing this heterogeneous enterprise with an SOA,” said Viarengo. “SOA, we believe, is really a great foundation for customers to move beyond integration into a highly compatible enterprise.”BEA with its SOA plan leverages the Web Services Reliable Messaging specification as a messaging infrastructure to bridge into other systems. BEA with its briefings this week appears to be offering reassurances about its direction, something that it needs to do in light of recent departures of major executives, including CTO Scott Dietzen and Chief Architect Adam Bosworth, Willett said. He noted the company had discussed QuickSilver and Diamond at the company’s eWorld conference in May.“They need to reassure people that they still have a technical vision and they’re on track to deliver all of those things that they talked about at their show,” Willett said. Software Development