"There's just too many unanswered questions right now," Willett said. For instance, it is unclear what makes something mSA-enabled, Willett said. He did, however, praise BEA for being ahead of the pack when it launched its unified middleware platform, BEA WebLogic Platform.

BEA's modularization plans for its WebLogic Server application server were revealed (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/03/30/76978_HNbeamodule_1.html) in March. But the company now believes this approach can work for all its products, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA tools unit. Modularization provides the right services to the customer, Roth said.

"Modularization will be a key design point for us, and ultimately this microServices Architecture will have an effect across all of our products," Roth said.

BEA has set a goal of having all its products leverage mSA by the end of 2008. MSA will key in on backplane components, application frameworks, activity services, presentation services, and infrastructure services. The architecture will leverage industry protocols and standards such as OSGi, SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Security, and SAML.

Also at the show on Tuesday, BEA: