BEA Systems, Inc.  - Server Software -  Category Directory

(408) 570-8000

2315 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131
www.bea.com

Sales

$1 billion

Business Description

BEA Systems, Inc. (“BEA®” or the “Company”) is the world’s leading application infrastructure software provider. Our WebLogic Enterprise Platform™ delivers a highly reliable, scalable software infrastructure designed to bring new services to market quickly, to lower operational costs by automating processes, and to automate relationships with suppliers and distributors. BEA’s WebLogic Enterprise Platform includes BEA WebLogic Server™, a standards-based application server that serves as a platform for deployment and integration of enterprise-scale applications and Web services; BEA WebLogic Integration™, a standards-based platform for workflow, application integration, Web services and business-to-business integration; BEA WebLogic Portal™, a sophisticated rules-based infrastructure for rich user interfaces to a wide variety of enterprise data; BEA Liquid Data™ for WebLogic®, a tool for simplifying access and aggregation of distributed information, enabling real-time visibility from a variety of data sources and BEA WebLogic Workshop™, a rich, easy to use framework for development and deployment of Web services and Java-based applications. Also included as integral parts of BEA’s product line are BEA WebLogic JRockit™, a highly flexible Java Virtual Machine (“JVM”), offering superior application performance, reliability, and manageability for mission-critical Java applications running on Intel platforms; and BEA Tuxedo™, a proven, extremely reliable and scalable multi-language enterprise platform for enterprise applications. In addition, we offer associated customer support, training and consulting services. Our products have a reputation for superior performance and high quality, evidenced by several awards and distinctions. For example, in its March 2004 annual Readers’ Choice Awards, Java Pro magazine readers voted BEA WebLogic Server and BEA WebLogic Workshop as the number one product in their respective categories; in the Web Services Journal XML-J Readers Choice awards, BEA WebLogic™ won eight different awards, including best integrated development environment, best business process management engine and best Web services framework; at the January 2004 Linux World conference, BEA WebLogic Platform™ 8.1 won the Product Excellence Award for Best System Integration Solution; and BEA WebLogic Workshop won PC Magazine’s Technical Excellence Award for development tools and Computer Reseller News’ Product of the Year for development tools.

Our products have been adopted in a wide variety of industries, including telecommunications, commercial and investment banking, securities trading, government, manufacturing, retail, airlines, pharmaceuticals, package delivery, and insurance. The BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform provides an application infrastructure for building and deploying distributed, integrated information technology (“IT”) environments, allowing customers to integrate private client/server networks, the Internet, intranets, extranets, virtual private networks, and mainframe and legacy systems as system components. Our products serve as a platform, integration tool or portal framework for applications such as billing, provisioning, customer service, electronic funds transfers, ATM networks, securities trading and settlement, online banking, Internet sales, inventory management, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, scheduling, logistics, and hotel, airline and car rental reservations. BEA employs more than 3,100 people, is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has 75 offices in 34 countries. Licenses for our products are typically priced on a per-central processing unit (“CPU”) basis, but we also offer licenses priced on other bases.

Our products are marketed and sold worldwide through a network of sales offices, the Company’s Web site at (www.bea.com), as well as indirectly through distributors, value added resellers (“VARs”) and partnerships with independent software vendors (“ISVs”), application service providers (“ASPs”), hardware original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) and systems integrators (“SIs”).

Industry Background

Over the past decade, the information systems of many large organizations have evolved from traditional mainframe-based systems to include distributed computing environments. This evolution has been driven by the benefits offered by distributed computing, including lower incremental technology costs, faster application development and deployment, increased flexibility, and improved access to business information. Despite these benefits, large-scale mission-critical applications that enable and support fundamental business processes, such as airline reservations, credit card processing, and customer billing and support systems, have largely remained in mainframe environments. For several decades, the high levels of reliability, scalability, security, manageability and control required for these complex, transaction-intensive systems have been provided by application server functionality included in the mainframe operating system. Mainframe environments, however, suffer from several shortcomings, including inflexibility, lengthy development and maintenance cycles, and limited, character-based user interfaces. These shortcomings have forced many organizations to seek solutions, such as those offered by us, that will enable them to overcome the limitations of distributed computing for mission-critical applications, while providing the robust computing infrastructure previously unavailable outside the mainframe environment.

In addition, many businesses are using the Internet as an element of these infrastructures. Businesses use the Internet as a means of selling products to consumers and distributors, buying components or whole products from suppliers, opening new customer accounts, scheduling service installation, providing account information and customer care, enabling reservations, funds transfers, bill payments and securities trading, and gathering information about customers and their buying habits. Many businesses also use intranets, extranets or virtual private networks for functions such as inventory control, decision support, logistics, reservations, customer care and provisioning, both to support internal users and to make information and applications available to their suppliers or distributors.

As a result of investment in several different technologies, enterprise IT organizations are characterized by complexity, heterogeneous environments, incompatible technologies and high cost of integration. Today’s enterprises must manage the effects of these realities. The heightened investment in technology has significantly increased IT complexity. The Internet has altered users’ expectations of availability, cost, service and functionality. The current economic and IT spending climate highlights the need to leverage existing assets and improve the return on investment for new initiatives.

Achieving the full benefits of distributed computing and Web services requires fully integrating external facing Web-based applications with existing enterprise applications, such as shipping, financial systems, inventory control, billing, payroll, and general ledger, as well as placing new, internal facing applications onto Web-based systems. In order to fully integrate internal applications with Web-based systems, the internal applications must be electronically linked to each other and must be built on a flexible, reliable, scalable, secure infrastructure that can run on, or connect to, the Web and support the demanding loads that result from heavy Internet traffic. The development of standards, such as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (“J2EE”), enabled the application development and deployment market to flourish, since individual developers, application companies and infrastructure companies could build compatible systems. Standards-based approaches, such as those supported by BEA, have been more widely adopted than proprietary approaches in Web application development and deployment. Standards are emerging in the market for integrating existing applications, including the J2EE Connector Architecture (“JCA”) and Java Messaging Services (“JMS”) and for providing Web services, through organizations such as the Web Services Interoperability Organization (“WS-I”), of which we are a co-founder. We have adopted the standards-based approach to integration, and believe that the standards-based approaches to integration have substantial advantages over proprietary approaches.

Historically, our primary product category has been application servers, represented by both our Tuxedo® and WebLogic Server products, which provide an important part of the infrastructure necessary for enterprise applications. BEA has leveraged its success in the application server market by expanding into complementary product categories, to meet a broader set of customers’ application infrastructure needs. The application infrastructure market consists of the application server and related integration, portal, security, development and deployment, and operations, administration and management product categories. BEA has developed significant features or product lines to address these markets and is in the process of developing additional features and products. BEA’s product market focus today is selling a broad platform encompassing all areas of application infrastructure tightly integrated into a single product, but also available for purchase as individual units. This allows us to service the application infrastructure market by enabling customers to buy just the modules needed for a specific project but to easily unify and extend those modules into a platform as they deploy subsequent projects, or to buy the entire platform at once.

Products

The BEA WebLogic Platform includes application infrastructure technology from proven BEA products. WebLogic Platform 8.1 consists of several products: WebLogic Server, Tuxedo, WebLogic Integration, WebLogic Portal, Liquid Data for WebLogic, WebLogic Workshop, and JRockit. These technologies are combined into a single installation, with a single set of application programming interfaces (“APIs”), and other common features such as a single security framework and administration console. By combining these technologies and features, WebLogic Platform offers a single, unified, easy-to-use infrastructure platform for development, deployment and integration of applications and Web services. WebLogic Platform also provides a natural migration path for current WebLogic Server, Integration or Portal users seeking to deploy solutions that enhance and extend their existing environments via a single, integrated architecture.

BEA WebLogic Server: BEA WebLogic Server 8.1, our current version of BEA WebLogic Server which became generally available in March 2003, provides a platform for application development and deployment. WebLogic Server provides the presentation, business and information-access logic, security and management services required for high scalability, high-availability mission-critical applications. WebLogic Server delivers key infrastructure functionality in several categories:

Broad Client Support. WebLogic Server supports a wide variety of Web browsers, wireless devices, ATMs, point of sale devices and others.

High Performance and Scalability. WebLogic Server is built on a highly scalable, clustered architecture, delivering load balancing, connection pooling, caching and optimized Web server, operating system, virtual machine and database connections.

High Availability. WebLogic Server delivers high system availability to mission-critical business applications. WebLogic Server delivers automatic fail over at the Web, business logic, and database tiers, allowing continued system availability despite failures of system components or disconnections of Web sessions. WebLogic Server uses clustering to take advantage of the redundancy of multiple servers to protect against system failures. The same service can be deployed across multiple servers in the cluster, so that if one server fails, another can take over, increasing the availability of the application to users. A WebLogic cluster consists of a number of WebLogic Servers deployed on a network, coordinated with a combination of domain name service, Java naming and directory interface tree replication, in-memory session data replication, and WebLogic remote method invocation clustering enhancements.

Broad Deployment Options. WebLogic Server features tight integration with the leading databases, enterprise operating systems, Web servers, Web browsers, mobile devices and Java virtual machines (“JVM”). WebLogic Server supports several operating systems, such as Sun Solaris, HP Unix, Aix, Windows, Red Hat Linux, IBM O/S 390 and IBM Linux/390. WebLogic Server is designed so that the underlying hardware, operating system and database are transparent to the application—the application is written to WebLogic Server and does not need to be modified based on the underlying hardware, operating
 
system or database. As a result, it is easy to migrate applications built on WebLogic Server from one underlying technology to another, or to deploy in a heterogeneous environment. For example, most WebLogic Server customers develop on Windows machines and deploy on Unix; some WebLogic Server customers deploy on several Unix servers, and use a mainframe as a system component to provide extra capacity for peak loads or as a backup site.

J2EE Services. WebLogic Server provides a robust implementation of the J2EE specification, including servlets, java server pages, enterprise java beans, java messaging services, java database connection, java transaction API and others. J2EE services provide access to standard network protocols, database and messaging systems.

Web Services. WebLogic Server seamlessly bridges J2EE and Web services by enabling developers to automatically deploy Enterprise JavaBeans (“EJBs”) as Web services with virtually no additional programming. WebLogic Server supports key Web services standards, including Simple Object Access Protocol (“SOAP”), Web Services Description Language (“WSDL”) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (“UDDI”).

Application Management and Monitoring. WebLogic Server provides a powerful, Web-based administration console that provides systems administrators with tools needed to deploy, configure and monitor applications. Through the administration console, administrators can configure attributes of resources, deploy applications or components, monitor resource usage (such as server load, JVM memory usage, or database connection pool load), view log messages, shut down servers, and other management actions. WebLogic Server’s system management and monitoring capabilities are enhanced by complementary offerings from ISVs, such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Mercury Interactive, NEON Systems, TeaLeaf Technology, Tivoli Software and Wily Technology.

Security. WebLogic Server provides a comprehensive security architecture encompassing access control cryptography-based privacy and user authentication and authorization. WebLogic Server also utilizes user and group-level access control lists, realms, secure socket layer, digital certificates and other standards-based security measures. Using these features, a developer can restrict access to WebLogic services through application logic when an application is being designed, or the system administrator can define how services are accessed after deployment. WebLogic Server can be incorporated into a single-sign-on solution by accessing existing security information stores, or it can operate independently. WebLogic Server’s security framework is enhanced by complementary offerings from ISVs such as Entegrity Solutions, Entrust Technology, Netegrity, Oblix, NetIQ and RSA Security.

BEA Tuxedo. Tuxedo is a platform for enterprise-scale applications built using the C, C++ or COBOL programming languages, and also supports CORBA and XML. The current version of Tuxedo, released in February 2003, also supports Web services. Tuxedo handles the underlying complexities of distributed, crossplatform application development, such as distributed transaction management, high availability, load balancing, transaction queuing, message queuing, event brokering and security. Tuxedo allows clients and servers to participate in a distributed transaction that involves coordinated updating of multiple databases. Tuxedo’s sophisticated transaction management helps ensure that all databases are updated properly, or will “roll-back” the databases to their prior state, assuring that data integrity is maintained despite component failures within complex computer systems. Tuxedo constantly monitors system components for application, transaction, network, and hardware failures. When a failure occurs, Tuxedo excludes the failed component from the system, manages any necessary recovery procedures, and re-routes messages and transactions to available systems—all transparent to the end-user and without disruption in service. Tuxedo manages unexpected high demand by automatically spawning and terminating application services as the system load dictates. Tuxedo balances the workload among all the available systems to minimize bottlenecks, whether the services are on the same component or spread across components. With data dependent routing, Tuxedo can route messages based on their context. This enables efficient transaction processing and higher levels of performance. Tuxedo enables connection of Internet clients to Tuxedo resources and to mainframes, as well as connection to applications built on WebLogic Server. Tuxedo supports a wide variety of platforms, such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM OS/390, Microsoft Windows, Compaq Tru64, Red Hat Linux and Unisys SVR 4.

BEA WebLogic Workshop. BEA WebLogic Workshop is an integrated development framework for developers on the BEA WebLogic Platform. This framework is designed to accelerate software development by providing simplified abstractions to help enable developers to build applications, Web services, integrations, business processes and portals quickly and easily. WebLogic Workshop uses the concept of “controls” to simplify access to complex resources. For each control, developers simply set properties, call methods and handle events, rather than programming to an API. This enables developers to build and deploy solutions on the entire BEA WebLogic Platform stack without requiring the developer to learn complexities such as J2EE, object-oriented programming, transaction processing and Web services. WebLogic Workshop automates the complex coding required for Java and Web services, so the developer can focus on business logic and application features. WebLogic Workshop is designed to make J2EE easier to adopt for developers who currently do not use Java, such as Visual Basic, Power Builder, COBOL and integration developers, as well as simplifying tasks for advanced J2EE developers.

BEA WebLogic Integration. WebLogic Integration offers a single solution that delivers application server, enterprise application integration (“EAI”), business process management, data integration and business-to business integration functionality. WebLogic Integration supports the JCA, cXML, RosettaNet, EDI, XOCP and JMS standards, bringing a standards-based approach to the integration market. Based on WebLogic Server for availability, transactions, security and other features, WebLogic Integration allows EAI solutions that support complex transactions, bi-directional communication between applications, synchronous or asynchronous communication between applications, high reliability, high availability, caching and the other features of WebLogic Server. These features offer customers the ability to link separate enterprise systems, not only with each other but also with Web and wireless applications. Business process management, supported by WebLogic Integration, is the process of building rules that instruct a computer system in the series of actions to take, or applications to update, when an event occurs. As business processes change, or new applications are integrated into the system, the system can be modified relatively easily by simply modifying the business process rules, rather than modifying the applications themselves or the connections between applications. This allows customers to build broad, robust systems that are very flexible and easy to modify. Data integration features of WebLogic Integration include data translation and data transformation, enabling customers to make broader use of data across the company and across multiple computing environments. WebLogic Integration also provides the infrastructure for business Web Services, which are multi-party, transactional, highly automated, Web-based interactions between applications. WebLogic Integration supports business-to-business integration, so that all of its features are available for systems that are integrated solely within a single organization, or between an organization and its suppliers, distributors or customers.

BEA WebLogic Portal. Enterprise portals enable a user to aggregate data and application functionality from several sources into a single screen or user interface. WebLogic Portal provides a framework for building enterprise portals, for internal, customer-facing or business-to-business purposes. Based on WebLogic Server for availability, transactions, security and other features, WebLogic Portal also makes it possible for an enterprise to deploy multiple applications with a common, personalized interface for customers, partners and employees, simplifying and improving their experience while lowering administrative costs and centralizing information access. WebLogic Portal includes an extensive set of features and enabling technologies, including portal configuration and administration tools, a unique rules-based entitlement engine, role-based personalization, reusable presentation software components, and a standards-based framework that supports JCA and Web Services.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic is a virtual data access and aggregation product for information visibility that supports a real-time unified view of disparate enterprise data. It provides a cost-effective, standard way to rapidly aggregate and expose logical views from any number of heterogeneous sources, including Web services, databases, flat files, XML files, applications and Web sites. This enables developers to re-use information across applications without moving or dealing with the complexity of the underlying data. It provides highly optimized, real-time data access and data processing inside and outside firewalls, regardless of source location, format, or type. Unlike alternative solutions that require the developer to change the data’s format or location, BEA WebLogic for Liquid Data allows developers to access the data in its existing state, reducing the complexity of the project and reducing the risk of accessing inconsistent or old data. Once accessed and aggregated, the data can be simply viewed by an end user, either internally (such as a sales representative or call center employee) or externally (such as a supplier of component parts or an online banking customer), or the data can be manipulated by an application or analytics system.

BEA WebLogic JRockit. BEA WebLogic JRockit is a Java virtual machine (“JVM”) designed for use in enterprise, server-based applications. A JVM is a layer of software whose primary role is to translate software code such as application and application server code into bytecode that is usable by the server’s chip and input/output systems. Traditional JVMs on the market today originated with desktop computer environments, supporting a single user. These JVMs have been modified over time to address server environments, which support multiple users and applications running on multiple networked machines. BEA WebLogic JRockit was designed from scratch to address server-based applications, which have very different requirements than desktop computer based applications. BEA WebLogic JRockit is designed to provide high reliability, scalability, and high performance for server-based applications. In contrast to desktop applications, server-based applications tend to communicate via a network, maintain a large number of active threads representing a large number of concurrent user sessions, and have long running times. BEA WebLogic JRockit combines code generation, memory management, thread management and native methods, combining the best optimization techniques in these four different areas for efficient operation. BEA WebLogic JRockit also provides a framework through which the Java programmer can easily profile and tune the JVM to improve application performance. BEA WebLogic JRockit is designed to be as platform independent as possible, making it easier to move applications to different operating systems and computer chips.

BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security™. BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security (“WLES”) allows applications and resources built on heterogeneous IT infrastructure and platforms—including diverse Web servers, application servers, and custom applications built in multiple languages—to leverage a common, consistent application security infrastructure. The solution can plug into customers’ existing IT infrastructure, often requiring no application coding because security services are provided transparently through the WLES resource container. WLES is an application security infrastructure solution that uses a service-oriented approach to help enable applications to leverage shared enterprise security services. It combines centralized policy control and visibility with distributed policy decision-making and enforcement. This combination is designed to help enable users to provide appropriate application-level security without sacrificing performance, scalability, and reliability. WLES can improve security and IT efficiency by replacing disparate and unsynchronized application security silos with a consistent service-oriented approach. Security technology and code is abstracted from the application into distributed enterprise “security services” that manage security requests from applications across the enterprise. Instead of maintaining these functions redundantly within each application, WLES can enable applications to delegate these functions to a common security services layer. WLES is designed to provide a seamless out-of-the-box experience by providing default security service implementations that include: authentication, identity assertion, credential mapping, dynamic role mapping, rules-based parametric authorization, and auditing.

Competition

The market for application server and integration software, and related software infrastructure products and services, is highly competitive. Our competitors are diverse and offer a variety of solutions directed at various segments of this marketplace. These competitors include IBM, which also offers operating system software and hardware as discussed below, and Oracle, which can bundle its competing product with their database and other software offerings at a discounted price. In addition, certain application vendors, enterprise application integration vendors and other companies are developing or offering application server, enterprise application integration and portal software products and related services that may compete with products that we offer. Further, software development tool vendors typically emphasize the broad versatility of their tool sets and, in some cases, offer complementary software that supports these tools and performs basic application server and integration functions. These tool vendors offer products that may compete with some of the features of our own product offerings. Finally, internal development groups within prospective customer organizations may develop software and hardware systems that may substitute for those we offer. A number of our competitors and potential competitors have longer operating histories, substantially greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, greater name recognition and a larger installed base of customers than we have.

Some of our competitors are also hardware vendors who bundle their own application server, integration software and tool products, or similar products, with their computer systems and database vendors that advocate client/server networks driven by the database server. IBM is the primary hardware vendor that we compete with which offers a line of application server, integration, and related software infrastructure solutions for their customers. Sun Microsystems is another hardware vendor who offers a line of application server and related software infrastructure solutions. IBM’s sale of application server and integration functionality along with its proprietary hardware systems requires us to compete with IBM, particularly with regard to its installed customer base, where IBM has certain inherent advantages due to its much greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, greater name recognition and the integration of its enterprise application server and integration functionality with its proprietary hardware and database systems. These inherent advantages allow IBM to bundle, at a discounted price, application server and integration solutions with computer hardware, software and related service sales. In addition, IBM Global Services, a division of IBM and a large provider of consulting and information technology services, can influence their service customers’ choice of software products in favor of IBM’s. Due to these factors, if we do not sufficiently differentiate our products based on functionality, reliability, ease of development, interoperability with non-IBM systems, performance, total cost of ownership and return on investment and establish our products as more effective solutions to customers’ technological and economic needs, our business, operating results, and financial condition will suffer.

In addition to its current products which include some application server functionality, Microsoft has announced that it intends to include and enhance certain application server and integration functionalities in its .NET technologies. Microsoft’s .NET technologies is a proprietary programming environment that competes with the Java-based environment of our products. A widespread acceptance of Microsoft’s .NET technologies, particularly among the large and mid-sized enterprises from which most of our revenues are generated, could curtail the use of Java and therefore adversely impact the sales of our products. The .NET technologies and the bundling of competing functionality in versions of Windows can require us to compete in certain areas with Microsoft, which has certain inherent advantages due to its much greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, its greater name recognition, very large developer community, its substantial installed base and the integration of its broad product line and features into a Web Services environment. We need to differentiate our products from Microsoft’s based on scalability, functionality, interoperability with non-Microsoft platforms, performance, total cost of ownership, return on investment, ease of development and reliability, and need to establish our products as more effective solutions to customers’ technological and economic needs. We may not be able to successfully or sufficiently differentiate our products from those offered by Microsoft, and Microsoft’s continued efforts in the application server, integration and Web Services markets and their proposed .NET alternative to Java could materially adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

In addition, current and potential competitors may make strategic acquisitions or establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties, thereby increasing the ability of their products to address the needs of their current and prospective customers. Accordingly, it is possible that new competitors or alliances among current and new competitors may emerge and rapidly gain significant market share. Such competition could materially adversely affect our ability to sell additional software licenses and maintenance, consulting and support services on terms favorable to us. Further, competitive pressures could require us to reduce the price of our products and related services, which could materially adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition. We may not be able to compete successfully against current and future competitors and any failure to do so would have a material adverse effect upon our business, operating results and financial condition.
 

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