BEA touts industry-specific solutions initiative

BEA Systems on Monday is rolling out its BEA Enterprise Solutions program, featuring the company’s Solution Frameworks initiative to link BEA WebLogic Platform with partners’ products for deployment of SOAs (service-oriented architectures).

The frameworks will focus on five industry trends: customer service, employee service, service delivery platform, trade processing, and RFID. Efforts will be concentrated initially in four vertical markets: telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, and government.

The goal of the frameworks initiative is “to relate BEA’s technology, plus specific partners, to major trends that we see in the marketplace,” said Mark Atherton, vice president of the enterprise solutions group at BEA. The program features pre-integration of partner technologies such as distributed caching and content management from partners such as Documentum with capabilities such as portlets, Atherton said.

BEA in seeking a solutions approach is not being unique, said analyst Jim Murphy, research director at AMR Rsearch. “I do see a lot of vendors moving closer to the application space by providing more complete capability,” Murphy said. BEA is looking to show it can provide a verticalized set of products and offer specific, business-focused initiatives, according to Murphy.

The first solution framework being launched is Customer Service, featuring WebLogic Platform, business intelligence, and analytics software from Hyperion and content management from EMC/Documentum and Interwoven. This framework is intended to provide a platform for customer service via Web, call center, IVR, and mobile technologies. Users can integrate processes, build a single view of the customer, and provide a personalized user experience across channels.

The employee service framework is intended to boost employee productivity and satisfaction while reducing costs of serving employees. It will automate processes such as benefits administration and performance reviews.

The service delivery framework, meanwhile, is designed for the telecommunications industry to enhance delivery of network services.

With its trade processing framework, BEA is seeking to address securities firms’ needs in trade management. Featured will be institutional portals to monitor block trades, research portals for content-sensitive filtering, exception handling to remediate broken trades, and cross-product clearance and settlement services. Business Activity Monitoring dashboard capabilities will provide visibility and control of the end-to-end trade lifecycle.

The RFID framework is intended to accelerate ROI on RFID investments by automating a class of business processes only recently made possible. Real-time event integration and business process automation in WebLogic Platform will be featured. The framework is designed to address issues such as reducing out-of-stock items, improving public safety through product recalls, reducing product counterfeiting, and reducing spoilage and obsolescence by monitoring expiry dates, temperature, and humidity.