BEA Systems Sees Products, Services and Alliances Fuel Momentum In the Integration Software Market
Wednesday June 25, 6:00 am ET
Market Shifts to Application Platform Suites and Convergence of Application Integration and Application Development
biz.yahoo.com
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) today announced continued success in the $1.7 billion integration software server market. A combination of events -- the market shift toward standards-based application platforms and away from proprietary integration servers, and the convergence of application development and application integration -- has helped BEA win new customers and expand alliances, and provided the impetus for new professional services.
Along with solid product sales, BEA now has more than 750 customers using BEA's integration products and services. By enabling customers to easily access their enterprise applications and resources, BEA achieved record sales in Q1 FY'04 [ended April 30, 2003] of application integration adapters for SAP, IBM MQ Series, Siebel, Oracle and PeopleSoft applications. BEA's business integration solutions continue to see strong uptake in the financial services, communications, government and logistics sectors, to include the following customers: Amdocs, AOL, British Telecommunication plc, Cesky Telecom A.S., COSMOTE (Greece), HP, HSBC (Hong Kong), Manugistics, Nuon N.V., Oy Radiolinja, Sumisho Electronics Co. Ltd, and Telecom Italia.
And in the past months, BEA has expanded alliances with Accenture, Blue Titan, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CSC Corporation, Cyclone Commerce, HP and Siebel Systems to include BEA's software integration solutions. This growth is further illustrated by a recent report by IDC ["Application Deployment Platform Software Market, 2000-2002 with Leading Suppliers," June 2003] that showed BEA's worldwide integration software server revenue, as measured by license revenue and related service revenue, grew nearly 110 percent in 2002 compared to 2001, and BEA moved up several spots to number six with 4.3 percent market share.
According to AMR Research's Alert [Austvold and Bois, AMR Research: "BEA Secret Sauce: Integration", March 7, 2003]: "Some CIOs said that they had used traditional EAI technologies in the past from traditional integration providers like IBM, Tibco, webMethods, Vitria, SeeBeyond and Mercator, but they recently decided to use BEA for all future application integration. ... Each client said emphatically that they would never use an independent integration broker technology again. Why? It was too hard, too expensive, and it required specialized training in a proprietary EAI environment while also requiring a separate set of development tools."
"CIOs are investing in technology that can make core business processes more efficient, enable real-time access to corporate assets for better responsiveness, and help their IT departments rapidly adapt to changes in the business," said Chet Kapoor, vice president and general manager, BEA WebLogic Integration. "The BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform helps CIOs accomplish these goals. BEA provides a unified integration platform that can reduce the cost and complexity of automating business processes and allow businesses to more efficiently connect users, applications and systems."
BEA Capitalizing on Changes in the Integration Software Market
According to Gartner (Schulte, "Application Integration Scenario: Impact of a New Technology is Finally Clear," October, 28, 2002), in 2002 packaged integration software was used in only six percent of integration projects, the rest being custom built either in house or by external consultants. To this end, IT organizations spent nearly $100 billion on services from internal staff and external consultants to integrate systems and applications. However, this trend may change as the functionality of packaged integration software evolves to support more advanced capabilities, such as business process modeling, packaged integration processes, adapter development toolkits, Web services, management tools, and more. With this maturing functionality and the opportunity for cost reduction, Gartner indicated that the percentage of packaged integration software used for integration projects is expected to increase to approximately 50 percent by 2006.
Recognizing that business integration requires technologies that combine business process, workflow, application and trading partner integration with simplified development tools, BEA introduced its business integration strategy in March 2003. The company also unveiled BEA WebLogic Platform(TM) 8.1 -- a unified, simplified and extensible solution that is designed to provide rapid business integration through the convergence of custom application development and application integration. By addressing these two issues as a single business problem, BEA's approach offers enterprises a unified and simplified way to build, integrate, extend and deploy enterprise applications.
"During the past two years BEA has increased research and development spending by 45 percent so we can be the leading provider of application infrastructure and capture the lion's share of the integration market opportunity," said Kapoor. "In addition to broadening our product portfolio, BEA is investing in our channels program, developer programs, and education, consulting and support services. These continued investments will help differentiate BEA from other software infrastructure vendors, and leapfrog the pure-play integration vendors, whose R&D investments are a fraction of BEA's."
BEA Offers New Integration Services
To complement BEA's integration products and partners' solutions, BEA Services has developed a broad portfolio of services to support integration projects. BEA Services is using its solution development methodology, called StreelThreads(TM), to include new architectural patterns and best practices that minimize the design and implementation risks associated with customers' projects and ultimately speed time-to-value. BEA's integration services, together with the StreelThreads integration methodology, are designed to help customers build, integrate and manage service-oriented architectures using the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform(TM).
BEA's Business Integration Assessment service can help customers simplify integration projects and meet their business requirements with an executable integration roadmap to meet their business requirements. Business integration "cookbooks," which provide repeatable solution templates, architectural patterns and best practices, focus on business processes relevant to key vertical industries. The first cookbook details how companies can synchronize customer data in order to get a single view of the customer. The second details how financial services companies can integrate business processes to establish straight through processing. A complete portfolio of business integration cookbooks is scheduled for the coming year.
"BEA's services help to accelerate the adoption of BEA technology and complement to our partners' consulting expertise," said Kapoor. "Our customers want a solutions partner that provides a complete spectrum of services. BEA's new integration services, when combined with consulting and integration services from partners such as Accenture and HP, provide a spectrum of services that's broad and deep, and unmatched in the industry."
Beta versions of BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 and other BEA WebLogic® products are available for download from www.bea.com. |
