BEA Debuts WebLogic Platform 8.1

This week marks the rollout of BEA's new integration platform, WebLogic 8.1. The company says this latest version makes even more strides in alleviating the growing integration headaches facing many enterprises today. "Our goal with WebLogic Platform 8.1 is to change the game of business integration," says Mercedes Ellison, senior vive president of market alliances for BEA. "We really are a next-generation solution." BEA says its converged application platform suite delivers business integration through a simplified, standards-based application infrastructure that can provide customers with business flexibility, helping drive down the overall costs of ongoing integration projects. Already, more than 100 partners have announced their support of the product, including E.piphany, HP, Hyperion, and Siebel Systems. Ellison says BEA worked closely with its many partners to develop the platform for the specific needs of its partners customers, and BEA's own customers as well. BEA WebLogic Platform is a services-oriented architecture consisting of the BEA application server and Java Virtual Machine, BEA's enterprise portal and application development framework, and BEA's integration solution. The company says the services-oriented architecture exposes and integrates business process more quickly and easily, so BEA's partners can more easily provide unprecedented business agility and flexibility to customers. "The introduction of BEA WebLogic 8.1 will change the way enterprises approach application integration and development," Ann Livermore, executive vice president, HP Services, said of the partnership in a BEA statement. "The convergence of application integration and development combined with the breadth and depth of HP's services is a significant step in providing our enterprise customers with increased business agility and return on IT." As part of Siebel's partnership with BEA, the company is releasing industry-specific integration applications for the for the communication, media, and energy industries on BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1. Siebel Business Integration Applications are packaged software that integrates business processes across disparate applications and are part of its Universal Application Network (UAN), a standards-based, vendor-independent integration solution. The applications are designed to enable organizations to successfully integrate a diverse environment of packaged, legacy, and custom applications without custom programming, which can dramatically lower cost, complexity, risk, and time to deployment, according to Siebel.