“Our competitors have a grab-bag approach”

‘Liquid Computing’ is BEA Systems’ answer to the growing demand for service-oriented architectures (SOA), which loom large in the enterprise application space. In an interview to Srikanth R P, Steve Faris, VP Marketing, Asia Pacific, BEA Systems spoke about the company’s future plans on the SOA front

* What is ‘Liquid Computing’?

‘Liquid Computing’ is BEA’s vision of an enterprise application infrastructure based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Just as liquids adapt to the shape of the container they are poured into, we believe that computing standards should also be equally flexible, rapidly changing to suit the needs of enterprises. Until now, the traditional IT architecture was static and application-oriented. This inevitably led to disparate applications running on proprietary platforms which, in turn, lead to the creation of silos of information. The trend towards SOA will ultimately lead to the opening up of interfaces to applications and help organisations combine them effortlessly with business processes. Our approach would be to build solutions that will help a CIO build a service-oriented architecture and align every enterprise application with business goals, not in months but in minutes.

* How is BEA’s approach different from that of other enterprise application vendors who are singing the same SOA tune?

Our competitors have what we call a ‘grab bag’ approach. Just take a bag and throw in all your products in it and call it an enterprise suite. The level of integration between different tools such as development and integration leave a lot to be desired in such approaches. We have an integrated development environment which makes it easy for developers to integrate business processes with applications.

* Can you give some examples?

We have a product available in the market for building SOAs. No other product currently offers an application platform suite which provides every tool a user would need, right from a unified development environment, to portal, application server and security. Our product, BEA WebLogic Server Process Edition (an enterprise application server product), is designed to help companies build service-oriented applications. You can say that this product is a starter pack for developing SOA applications. The product is one of the first applications on the J2EE platform to converge the capabilities of application development and business process management. With it J2EE developers can leverage powerful BPM tools and frameworks to build and integrate complex business solutions. Like all BEA products, this product is designed to provide a common administration, user interface and coding environment to design new applications and increase productivity. We have also innovated with Alchemy, which is being developed to handle the mobile aspect of Liquid Computing. Through this platform, we are looking at bringing in the large community of Java developers who can be tapped for building SOAs.

* BEA has also announced an open source initiative with Beehive? Can you elaborate on the reasons behind this move?

With Beehive, we plan to release a part of the source code for WebLogic Workshop Java Development environment under a BSD open source license. Project Beehive has already been accepted as an open source project in the Apache community. This means that other developers will be able to build applications and deploy them on application servers other than BEA’s. We have two objectives with Beehive. Firstly, we want to harness the momentum and enthusiasm of open source developers. Secondly, this move will help popularise Workshop among other developers. The familiarity with the product could help in creating additional demand for the WebLogic platform. With Beehive, we have effectively created a project that would accelerate the proliferation of Java particularly for creating SOAs.