The Hindu Business Line : BEA Systems bullish on service architecture market

IT spending has dropped over the last two years and chief information officers (CIOs) are more pragmatic about adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service infrastructure is poised to be a $9-billion market by 2008.

While SOA is not ready yet, as adjudged by Mr Rob Levy, Executive Vice-President, Chief Technology Officer, BEA Systems, Inc, the slow growth will allow an even adoption across verticals.

"SOA is the next logical evolutionary step to re-usability," said Mr Levy. "More than 70 per cent of CIOs have an SOA implementation in-house," he added.

BEA Systems is a US-based company that primarily provides application servers — the WebLogic family. The company, with its acquisition of PlumTree two months ago, is also working on portal technologies, said Mr Levy.

Other recent product releases by the company include the JRockit Real Time Addition, which allows developers to write applications in Java in real-time situations. Previously, Mr Levy explained, Java was not used due to lag and unpredictability. With the Java Virtual Machine, BEA has made Java usable in real time applications. The Bangalore facility employs 150 engineers and is two years old.

Research on Aqualogic, the suite of software that enables SOA, is under way. Also, engineers here are working on WebLogic Integration, which combines WebLogic Portal, Server and WorkShop products. "Around 20-30 engineers are currently working on version 9.2 of WebLogic Integration," said Mr John Giubileo, Senior Vice-President, Product Operations, BEA Systems.

The company is "evaluating new markets." It is keeping an eye on trends, especially in the hardware segment, and how they would impact the back-end operations, said Mr Levy. One example he gave was radio frequency identification (RFID), which can be used in conjunction with WebLogic at retail stores.