BEA Systems Inc. on Monday is releasing a version of its application infrastructure suite designed to enable ISVs to deliver products for service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
The BEA WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is priced at US$17,000 as opposed to the standard Platform package, which costs US$90,000. Featured in the ISV package are several offerings from the company’s WebLogic line: the Server application server, Workshop Java development environment, JRockit Java Virtual Machine, and specialized versions of the company’s Portal and Integration offerings.
The Integration package features service orchestration and BPM, according to BEA. Specifically, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) support is featured in the integration offering. BPEL is being considered as a standard for business process deployment of Web services.
All the middleware needed to build SOA applications is featured in the package, said Bobby Napiltonia, vice-president and general manager of worldwide channels and alliances at BEA. The company as a whole has been focusing on SOAs of late.
The ISV offering “is meant for the runtime support of the ISV’s specific product,” said Robert Flannigan, technology strategist for worldwide channels and alliances at BEA.
“It’s really to address the market need for an application platform suite rather than just an application server,” Flannigan said.
But an analyst said BEA’s move was made to counter the growing popularity of the open source JBoss application server as well as IBM’s WebSphere application server.”
They kind of need to do this to counter JBoss on the one hand, which a wide variety of ISVs are now bundling or considering, and of course IBM on the other side, which is leveraging its influence to sway larger ISVs, and leveraging its channel and channel dollars for small and midsize business-oriented ISVs,” said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis.
“They are making it very cheap for the ISV to pick up the whole Platform set of products including Portal and Integration. So that’s a big change. SOA remains the current buzzword, I’m not sure if it has concrete meaning to ISVs,” Willett said.
