BEA Systems last week unveiled a new family of products that address what it calls the "service infrastructure." AquaLogic features BEA's new Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), formerly code-named Quicksilver, as well as repackages and upgrades some existing products. The AquaLogic family is expected to consist of six product lines: messaging, data integration, security, process, portal and composition. BEA has also made an OEM arrangement with Systinet to resell its UDDI Registry via the AquaLogic ESB.

BEA claims that AquaLogic is the first family of Service Infrastructure products built from the ground up to do what SOA is meant to do: assemble composite applications and processes out of services built on any platform.

Positioning AquaLogic vs. WebLogic, BEA VP Bill Roth said "WebLogic is focused on developers. AquaLogic is focused on application specialists and architects, people who want to work at a higher level." In terms of what will really differentiate this SOA stack from competitors, BEA hopes to be "the Switzerland of software," Roth said. "What separates us is we're not doing this as a way to sell hardware, services or applications."

In a possibly unrelated event, BEA shares fell today after the company was downgraded "underperform" by Wall street Analyst Bear Stearns, over worries that the current management team could not turn the company around.

Those wishing to see AquaLogic in action can see a webcast from BEA on Jun 15, 2005 at 9:00 a.m. (Registration is required.)

The real question in all of this is how AquaLogic can differentiate itself from such competitors as SeeBeyond and similar entities. SOA and web services, specifically, are continuing to heat up and products such as this are attempting to serve as an answer to interoperability; do you think they'll succeed? What do you see as the crucial feature for such integration systems? Why?

All these products are good enough as long as we can achieve the following issues of integration:

1. Accommodating incremental dynamic interfaces (can we accommodate decrementing interfaces too?)
2. Sufficiently untangled build dependency (how about no build dependency at all!)

It does not matter what we use (SOA or raw classes) to achieve these, but we need to get our software work that way. The additional headache with web services is the sheer verboseness of it. It is just because we have extra resources, should we use them up. I think there are better alternative.

I guess most of the integration tools try to achieve these goals but fail miserably. I hope we achieve the integration nirvana very soon.


-Abhijit

BEA's financials are in great shape - $1.6 billion in the bank, revenue up, profits up. Support & maintenance (which includes upgrades) is up. Our main problem with Wall Street is that new license growth is flat...

Anyway, take a closer look at AquaLogic. It's quite a bit different from other products. The Service Bus is BEA's first completely in-house developed product (everything else started with a small aquisition). It's a very exciting product to me, one of the reasons I joined BEA a few months ago.

As for the rebranding -- the point really is that Liquid Data and Enterprise Security are all getting major new releases, add in the bundling of Systinet UDDI, and you get a picture of a platform that isn't really focused on "Java programming", it's more focused on service management, querying, transformation, metadata, and configuration. Though it's still built on WebLogic Server 9 (Diablo) so you get the Java basis if need-be.

Stu Charlton
BEA systems (I speak for myself, not BEA)

At least BEA reskinned its website with the release of aqualogic. I love the blood-in-the-water inspired Flash homepage that can only come from the harpoons of Wall Street analysts.

Despite the financial situtation it seems the technology is still viable. How does WebLogic fare as a message provider compared to other vendors? Why not WebLogic Server + Mule?

andrew

"What separates us is we're not doing this as a way to sell hardware, services or applications."

... and they are going to make money how?

-Dave

"What separates us is we're not doing this as a way to sell hardware, services or applications."... and they are going to make money how?

By charging for software licenses? It may surprise you, but some companies still do that...

"What separates us is we're not doing this as a way to sell hardware, services or applications."... and they are going to make money how?-Dave

By providing _and_ supporting the foundation on which you can build those services and applications. Making sure you don't get bogged by interoperability issues, the framework handles that for you, so you can focus on your application services.

The repackaging comment is not correct. While some parts of AquaLogic were existing products that have been incubating outside of the WebLogic Platform, the service bus, the Web service management and the registry, which are the foundation of the AquaLogic family, are all new.

Between Tuxedo, JRockit, WebLogic and AquaLogic, BEA has a portfolio of product families that each have a life of their own.

Since BEA published record Q1 results there have been three upgrades. The one downgrade yesterday is part of being a public company.

Eric
BEA Systems

The repackaging comment is not correct. While some parts of AquaLogic were existing products that have been incubating outside of the WebLogic Platform, the service bus, the Web service management and the registry, which are the foundation of the AquaLogic family, are all new.Between Tuxedo, JRockit, WebLogic and AquaLogic, BEA has a portfolio of product families that each have a life of their own.Since BEA published record Q1 results there have been three upgrades. The one downgrade yesterday is part of being a public company. EricBEA Systems

Last year when people started resigning from BEA, i read somewhere that people like Boshworth were unstaisfied with BEA's future direction. It was said that BEA is heavily focussing on its Weblogic Workshop product. personally , i felt Weblogic Workshop is going in the right directon.It had drag and drop features right from creating portlets to designing workflows. For RAD in J2EE we do require products like that.

But just following the process of branding and re-branding an SOA infrastructure doesnt provide any tangible benefits.

Regards
Surajeet

AquaLogic and WebLogic are complimentary. WebLogic is built to give developers a unified App Server, Portal and Integration platform, all front ended by Workshop. We will continue down that path with a new release of the platform products and a new version of Workshop based on Eclipse and Apache Beehive.

AquaLogic is about back end Service Infrastructure- the message bus, Web services management, service registry, data services, security services, etc. that will alow you to integrate and manage the services.

You will build new apps/services with WebLogic and/or other products (.Net, Netweaver, WebSphere, etc.) and hook them into the AquaLogic backbone.

AquaLogic and WebLogic are complimentary. WebLogic is built to give developers a unified App Server, Portal and Integration platform, all front ended by Workshop. We will continue down that path with a new release of the platform products and a new version of Workshop based on Eclipse and Apache Beehive.AquaLogic is about back end Service Infrastructure- the message bus, Web services management, service registry, data services, security services, etc. that will alow you to integrate and manage the services.You will build new apps/services with WebLogic and/or other products (.Net, Netweaver, WebSphere, etc.) and hook them into the AquaLogic backbone.

If AquaLogic is about back-end Service infrastructure, then what is Liquid Computing?

Regards
Surajeet

AquaLogic and WebLogic are complimentary. WebLogic is built to give developers a unified App Server, Portal and Integration platform, all front ended by Workshop. We will continue down that path with a new release of the platform products and a new version of Workshop based on Eclipse and Apache Beehive.AquaLogic is about back end Service Infrastructure- the message bus, Web services management, service registry, data services, security services, etc. that will alow you to integrate and manage the services.You will build new apps/services with WebLogic and/or other products (.Net, Netweaver, WebSphere, etc.) and hook them into the AquaLogic backbone.

If AquaLogic is about back-end Service infrastructure, then what is Liquid Computing?RegardsSurajeet

AquaLogic is the collection of components which make up the service infrastructure and Liquid computing is the process to achieve a service oriented infrastructure using AquaLogic. Am i right?

Regards
Surajeet

Liquid Computing is the end state of making frozen IT assets (apps, data and processes) more fluid. The Liquid Computing vision spans all of BEA’s product lines- WebLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit and AquaLogic.

BEA recognizes that most customers will always have heterogeneous environments made up of Java platforms (WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.), Microsoft .Net, SAP apps, Oracle apps, other packages and custom apps that were written on any number of current/legacy technologies. They will also have to increasingly tie into external partner systems.

When moving to a SOA, these apps will be service enabled and plugged into the AquaLogic bus, making it easier for developers to build new composite apps, portals, business process or services that span these back end systems. For administrators, AquaLogic will make it easier to manage security policy, versioning, monitor service level agreements, etc. across dozens, hundreds or thousands of services in production.

Eric
BEA Systems

So how does this compare to Sonic's ESB offering? What is the value-add to the product line beyond saying BEA is a 1st class player inthe ESB space.

I'm past the brochure-ware and phase shifting solid->liquid analogies unless there is a GasLogic or PlasmaLogic on the drawing board. Beyond marketing, what is new in AquaLogic. There is mention of a monitoring/deployment tool. Expand.

BEA AquaLogic Service Bus converges the integration capabilities of an Enterprise Service Bus with service management in a single software product. This accelerates configuration and deployment, and simplifies management of shared services across a service oriented architecture. ALSB delivers intelligent message brokering, dynamic routing and transformation to support of heterogeneous service end-points, integrated with service lifecycle management capabilities including service registration, monitoring, and threshold-defined SLA enforcement.

ALSB provides a number of functions that making it easier for customers to organize services:

1. Resources and services can be organized into logical projects, each with a hierarchy of folders that provide a convenient way of aligning with and searching for services and resources by departments or other organizational structures.
2. ALSB tracks what objects are referencing a particular service asset as well as what other assets are being referenced by the service. This cross reference is done at the project and service level and enables seamless dependency tracking.
3. BEA AquaLogic Service Bus supports the concept of sessions to enable administrators to make changes over time intervals and keep them private until ready to submit as updates for deployment. Sessions enable on-going configuration changes to be managed by focused administrative resources and tested before deploying.

Nils Gilman
BEA Systems

I wanted to post a reaction to the text above about the analyst comments. In reality, the downgrade was becuase BEA was unlikely to be taken over, not because of management concerns. BEA has one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry.

BEA claims that AquaLogic is the first family of Service Infrastructure products built from the ground up to do what SOA is meant to do: assemble composite applications and processes out of services built on any platform.

Is the claim that AquaLogic lets you expose Services written in heterogenous technologies _without_ much additional coding or configuration effort?
Usually most SOA/ESB packages tend to be more of jSOA's or jESB's looking at the ones I know of: you can expose Services in heterogenous technologies, IF you first code an integration layer using third party adapters or (best case) spend hours on end configuring (programming?!) xml-files.

If the claim is simply the "usual stuff" + "first!" then I can probably think of ca 10 other open source and commercial packages that can claim to be earlier than AquaLogic. :)

This whole "new family of products" is nothing more than a simple rebranding of existing BEA products under a new umbrella of AquaLogic.

I have to admit, I must agree with Wall Street analysts. It's unfortunate to see a company of such size with such a great product wandering without any direction.

--Dmitriy.