BEA Announces AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5; Service-Enabling Data for Easier Access

BEA Enters OEM Agreement with StrikeIron to Enable Front Office to Back Office Integration, Bring Live Data to Business Users via Microsoft Excel

Core News Facts

1. BEA announces strategic OEM partnership with StrikeIron, Inc. to bring data to the front end for business analysts.
2. BEA releases AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5; available today visit bea.com/aqualogic for more information.
3. ALDSP 2.5 is designed to offer fast-path integration between data services and an enterprise service bus (with ALSB and ALDSP).
4. ALDSP 2.5 is now natively bilingual, fluent in both XQuery and SQL.

BEAWORLD 2006 – San Francisco – Sept. 19, 2006 – BEA Systems, Inc., a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the release of AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5, which provides a virtual, unified view of data regardless of its type or location within the enterprise. BEA also announced a strategic OEM relationship with StrikeIron, Inc., the provider of the largest marketplace of externally available plug-and-play Web services. The company is collaborating with StrikeIron to incorporate their OnDemand Web Services for Microsoft Excel product into the latest version of ALDSP, in order to facilitate the integration of backend data with the front office user.

“Up to 70 percent of application development time can be spent accessing disparate data. As a result, data should be one of the first things to be service-enabled using a Service-Oriented Architecture approach. As companies decouple or abstract their data from applications and the data source in SOAs, they need to be able to ensure compliance and control over the data more than ever before,” said Paul Patrick, vice president and chief architect for AquaLogic, BEA Systems, Inc. “ALDSP 2.5 service-enables and aggregates data that traditionally has been locked in disparate silos across the enterprise. It’s the live data engine powering the service-driven enterprise.”

ALDSP is a key product within the AquaLogic product family, which is part of the BEA SOA 360º platform. Announced today at BEAWorld 2006, the BEA SOA 360o platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic®, Tuxedo and the company’s newest product initiative, BEA Workspace 360o. (See Sept. 19, 2006, press release titled, “BEA Announces SOA 360o; Industry’s Most Unified SOA Platform to Transform and Optimize Business.”)

Data delivery through SOA offers today’s best and most reliable solution to many of the typical obstacles, such as diverse data source types, decentralized information repositories and various technology limitations. ALDSP represents a new paradigm for data access and management in the enterprise, through delivery of information as a service to people, processes and applications. BEA ALDSP 2.5 offers fast-path integration with other critical service infrastructure platform products, such AquaLogic Service Bus, helping to enable companies to fully realize the benefits of a full SOA implementation. In addition, this latest version is designed to deliver greater flexibility to support Web services and reporting tools with a bilingual engine to both XQuery and, now, SQL.

“Traditional data integration methods are costly in terms of time and resources and typically results in data that becomes quickly outdated,” said Bob Brauer, chief executive officer and president, StrikeIron. “The ALDSP Excel capability helps put a face on the BEA SOA solution, empowering business users to access real-time data across the enterprise in an environment that they are already familiar with and without any programming. This also frees up IT resources and support requirements so they can be re-allocated to business critical efforts. Solutions like these can have a tremendous effect on the bottom line.”

Latest Release Delivers Data Access and Productivity

New features in BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5 include:

* Native Integration with AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB). A complete SOA implementation requires both an enterprise service bus and a data services layer working seamlessly in concert. The release offers a custom transport path where data services within ALDSP can be directly accessed by the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus product, providing better performance, security and full array of data and services management capabilities.
* Native SQL Support. Adding a native SQL interface to ALDSP maximizes an organization’s return on investment for implementing a data services layer since more clients such as business intelligence reporting tools can consume data services and benefit from better performance, data reuse and consistency. ALDSP is now optimized for both SQL and XQuery, acting as a bilingual engine, enabling it to not only cover a broader set of business intelligence use cases but also deliver real-time views of business data to reporting tools from relational and non-relational sources such as packaged applications or Web services.
* ALDSP Microsoft Excel Support. BEA is now able to bring live data to business users via Web Services within Microsoft Excel from multiple, diverse data sources. This new feature connects the front office to the heterogeneous back office – empowering business users by providing simple drag and drop data service directly into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This offloads the high cost and time associated with data integration efforts required by IT and instead gives business users greater office productivity at their fingertips.

Availability

ALDSP 2.5 is available today. For more information, visit bea.com/aqualogic or see the product in action at BEAWorld. Register today at bea.com/beaworld.

About BEAWorld

BEAWorld is the premier event for SOA thought leadership and is taking place in three strategic world markets spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia. The conference is designed to provide critical insights, hands on instruction, best practice strategies and opportunities for interaction with like-minded professionals, industry leaders, visionaries and expert practitioners.

In addition to working to help make SOA a successful reality, BEAWorld is the place to find the latest information on BEA’s infrastructure technologies including BEA Tuxedo®, BEA WebLogic, BEA AquaLogic, and BEA SOA 360º. This year’s show will also include a Partner Showcase, highlighting the latest and most innovative developments from the extensive BEA partner community.

The first of three planned worldwide events is scheduled to begin today, Sept. 19 at the Moscone Convention Center North in San Francisco. Two additional events are scheduled in the following cities: Prague (Oct. 11-12) and Beijing (Dec. 13-14). Visit bea.com/beaworld to register today. For sponsorship information, please visit bea.com/beaworld/sponsors/.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA’s SOA 360º platform is the industry’s most unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization, in order to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to achieve Business LiquidITy™ can be found at www.bea.com.

Copyright © 2006 BEA Systems,Inc. All rights reserved. BEA, Built on BEA, Jolt, Joltbeans, Steelthread, Top End, Tuxedo, BEA WebLogic Server, BEA JRockit, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, and WebLogic are registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA AquaLogic, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, BEA dev2dev Subscriptions, BEA eLink, BEA MessageQ, BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, BEA WebLogic Enterprise, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security, BEA WebLogic Express, BEA WebLogic Integration, BEA WebLogic Java Adapter for Mainframe, BEA WebLogic JDriver, BEA WebLogic Log Central, BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, BEA WebLogic Platform, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA WebLogic SIP Server, BEA WebLogic WorkGroup Edition, and BEA WebLogic Workshop are trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA Mission Critical Support is a service mark of BEA Systems, Inc. All other company and product names may be the subject of intellectual property rights reserved by third parties.

Contact Information

May Petry

BEA Systems, Inc.

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