BEA Systems Inc. is sharpening its focus on vertical industries with the recent roll-out of the WebLogic Communications Platform targeted at the telecom industry and the expected launch of ?RipCurl?, an RFID edge server for retail and supply chain applications, by the first half of this year.

Benjamin Renaud, senior director, Telecom Products, BEA Systems, said the WebLogic Communications Platform is the first set of products aimed at a specific industry. He pointed out that BEA has a very long history in the telecom sector and that Tuxedo, its first product, was originally developed at AT&T Bell Labs.

BEA is hoping to capitalize on a period of transition in the sector where service providers, faced with declining revenue from voice calls, have been upgrading networks and developing new services in a bid to find new business.

Yankee Group analyst Rob Rich believes that the telecom industry is at a ?critical juncture in its evolution?. ?With expanded competition and increased pressure for new services revenue, service providers are looking for ways to accelerate service innovation while minimizing delivery costs,? Rich said.

Echoing the analysis, Renaud noted that with increased competition, the rapid pace of technology innovation for devices and the need to increase ARPU (average revenue per user), telecom operators are under pressure to deploy new services faster. The other set of pressures that are coming into play are around operating cost, and the need for operators to move over to a more efficient and more cost-effective IP infrastructure. ?These two trends are synergistic, since IP networks are the right base on which to deploy a services platform,? he said.

According to Renaud, the BEA WebLogic Communications Platform is built to allow telecom operators to rapidly build and deploy services. Its other key benefit is the ability for operator to safely open up their network, through a standards-based access layer (Telecom Web Services) and a policy layer. ?This allows operators to start monetizing third-party content and application provider.?

The first product to be launched under the WebLogic Communications Platform is the WebLogic SIP Server, a new version of BEA?s Java application server software which includes integrated support for SIP (session initiation protocol). SIP is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) specification for initiating various types of user sessions over IP networks including voice calls and videoconferences.

The WebLogic SIP Server is designed to allow carriers to extend their network infrastructure with standards-based computing technologies to provide such new, converged voice and data services as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), integrated fixed and wireless services, multi-player gaming with voice, -real-time interactive voting and conferencing applications.

Next in the series of carrier infrastructure products that BEA plans to roll out is WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, which is designed to allow carriers to define, manage and enforce access and quality of service (QOS) parameters for network resources. That product is still being developed and is planned for delivery around June.

As for RipCurl, the RFID edge server is designed to help automate processes associated with radio frequency identification technology, such as managing devices and filtering RFID data.

Mark Blowers, senior analyst at Butler Group, noted that the adoption of RFID will put a huge strain on storage because movements could potentially generate millions of transactions, and the new data would need to be dealt with. Middleware players such as BEA come into the picture because their software ties all the RFID systems together, summarizing the information and managing the reader devices and RFID tags, he said.

The move by BEA is seen as a shrewd one by analysts, who say middleware players need to explore new markets in the face of shrinking licensing revenues. For its fourth fiscal quarter which ended in January, BEA Systems reported a fall in licence revenue for the fourth straight quarter although overall, there was a 5 per cent rise in quarterly revenue and earnings.