BEA Unveils Latest SOA Integration Tools

Middleware vendor BEA Systems has announced the first three members of its Enterprise Integration Portfolio (EIP), tools aimed at helping users at different stages of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments.

The EIP consists of upcoming releases of two existing products—WebLogic Integration (WLI) 9.2 and AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) 2.6—and a new bundle combining WLI and ALSB. Over time, BEA may add other tools to the portfolio as it builds more interoperability between its products.

The new bundle, released Monday, is called AquaLogic Integrator, and initially will bring together the current versions of WLI and ALSB, 8.1.6 and 2.5, respectively. The new releases of the WLI and ALSB tools will be rolled into the bundle when they become available later this year, according to Kelly Emo, director of integration product marketing at BEA.

WLI focuses on enabling tight integration between different enterprise processes such as applications, while ALSB facilitates more loose connectivity between services.

While BEA didn’t release specific pricing for the products, the company plans to offer the AquaLogic Integrator bundle at an approximate 30 percent discount compared to the cost users would pay to buy WLI and ALSB as separate products, Emo said.

New features in WLI 9.2 include an Eclipse-based development environment, while one of the new focuses in ALSB 2.6 is the ability for users to customize how they manage their service integration. ALSB 2.6 also includes a number of features to support large-scale SOA installations, which Emo defines as companies with 500-plus services, so far accounting for between 10 percent to 25 percent of BEA’s service bus users.

The EIP forms an important part of BEA’s overall SOA 360 platform to tie together its three core product families—AquaLogic, WebLogic and Tuxedo—with its Workspace 360 SOA tool set. The company unveiled SOA 360 in September at BEAWorld conference in San Francisco.

BEA is expected to further flesh out its SOA 360 plans, including issuing some software road maps at its next BEAWorld conference due to take place in Beijing, Dec. 13-14. The vendor plans to gradually roll out pieces of SOA 360 over the next one to two years.

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

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