BEA Systems Realigns to Focus on E-commerce Transactions - WebLogic Enterprise 5.0 - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, Jan 12, 2000 by Brian Ploskina

BEA Systems Inc. (www.beasys.com) announced that it is realigning to focus on whot it says are the four key elements of e-commerce transactions: servers, integration, applications, and services.

The four new company divisions are named the e-commerce server division, e-commerce integration division, e-commerce application components division, and e-commerce services division. The e-commerce server division recently released version 5.0 of WebLogic Enterprise Server.

The latest version of the Java-based application server includes support for CORBA and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), as well as an ability to use Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (www.sun.com) Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

"E-commerce is about transactions, and our heritage is about transactions," says Joe Menard, president of BEA's e-commerce server division. "We believe there are only a couple companies that can do this whole stack." The other one, Menard says, is IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com).

Menard says most of BEA's technology remains under the middleware umbrella, but most people view the term as industry jargon. He says "transactions" more efficiently explains the function of BEA'S product line.

Drawing a distinction between BEA and Microsoft's middleware solutions, Menard says, "We think the world wants standards and rapid technology. We think Java has proven it can do that, and if you want to do e-commerce applications today, you want to use Java." Menard maintains, however BEA's brand value is that it remains vendor neutral. .