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SCMP Reporter

The rivalry between BEA Systems and IBM has intensified as each trumpets tighter business-integration features in new software products.

Both companies last week unveiled updated middleware systems designed to help enterprises link their dated and disparate systems with the Web.

BEA fired the first salvo in the battle last Monday at its annual technology conference in Florida, launching version 8.1 of its flagship WebLogic product.

WebLogic is an application server suite that directly competes against IBM's WebSphere platform.

The market for this kind of middleware - software that glues together separate and often already existing programs in a computing system - is predicted to be worth US$4.4 billion by 2006, according to research firm International Data Corp.

BEA chairman and chief executive Alfred Chuang said the new and improved WebLogic combined custom applications development and integration into a single, 'industrial-strength' software platform.

The updated product includes BEA's Workshop 8.1 program, which Mr Chuang claimed was the information technology (IT) industry's first unified environment for the rapid development and integration of service-orientated applications.

BEA chief marketing officer Tod Nielsen said: 'The Workshop development environment provides an easy-to-use tool that can enable customers to base all IT projects on one platform.

'[These projects] include development of Web applications and Web services, portal and integration projects to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market and development costs.'

He said this standard platform for applications development and integration bridged the void created by traditional enterprise application integration software products from specialists such as webMethods, Vitria and SeeBeyond.

BEA says traditional point-to-point integration of legacy applications has led to costly and time-consuming IT projects that fail to address future applications development.

For decades, applications development and integration work have been created by organisations that are isolated from one another.

Mr Nielsen said this had hindered the adoption of new products, frustrated technology buyers and slowed the pace of productivity gains.

'BEA recognised this inefficiency and has developed a converged application platform suite that offers enterprises a unified and simplified way to build, integrate, extend and deploy enterprise applications and Web services,' he said.

IBM tried to steal BEA's thunder the day after it launched WebLogic 8.1 by announcing enhancements to its WebSphere business integration software product portfolio in New York.

The computer giant said these advances included 'a broad set of functions necessary to integrate, manage and monitor business processes across an enterprise and with trading partners'.

These functions allowed for 'horizontal integration', in which enterprises could model and simulate how business processes would flow across their entire operations.

But Mr Nielsen said BEA had taken the lead in helping businesses to make their different computing systems work together.

'When infrastructure software is neither tightly integrated nor able easily to integrate within heterogeneous environments, businesses often have to resort to bringing in consultants to make it work,' he said.

He urged businesses to calculate how many dollars they would need to spend on additional integration services for every dollar they spent on IBM's middleware product.

Mr Nielsen said BEA was unconcerned by IBM's huge IT hardware, software and services organisation.

'We have all the other major IT players on our side' he said.

One key ally is Hewlett-Packard, which has helped sell BEA technologies and aligned its products and services to WebLogic.

HP chairman and chief executive Carly Fiorina said in her keynote address at the BEA conference: 'Our partnership with BEA is absolutely integral to how we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.'



Software rivals raise the bar on integration