BEA pitches native SOA platform

19.09.2006
Positioning itself as the industry's first provider of a native SOA platform, BEA Systems unveiled SOA 360 -- as in 360 degrees -- at Tuesdays' BEAWorld 2006. The vagueness of the announcement, however, has at least one analyst claiming the company still has a lot of explaining to do.

SOA 360 spans three BEA product families -- Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic -- and features an SOA collaborative tooling environment, called BEA WorkSpace 360. Another key element is the company's "microServices Architecture," aka mSA. Based on SOA and the concept of a services network, mSA features modular services based on BEA products, is event-driven, and uses notification services to publish and discover modular components or "microServices."

WorkSpace 360 includes a product family due in 2007. It is geared to enable business and IT professionals to collaborate and work individually and features roles for the business analyst, enterprise architect, developer, and IT operations professional. Working with the role-based products is WorkSpace Central, which is designed to provide SOA lifecycle management and centers around the company's metadata repository, AquaLogic Enterprise Repository.

"SOA 360 is a governing approach to modeling, creating, developing, and deploying a full lifecycle SOA application. It is a unifying methodology," featuring all of BEA's SOA products, said Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA.

"I'm here to tell you with confidence that SOA is very real," BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang said in a keynote presentation focused on SOA.

Details provided during presentations on Tuesday, however, were too vague, said Shawn Willet, principal analyst at Current Analysis.