BEA Joins Interop Vendor Alliance with Microsoft and Other Industry Leaders to Champion Vendor-Neutral Enterprise Solutions

Cross-Industry Group of Vendors and Organizations to Work Together to Ensure Cross-Platform Interoperability and help bridge .NET and Java Computing Environments

Core News Facts:

1. BEA Systems is working with Microsoft and other industry leaders through the Interop Vendor Alliance to address customer interoperability challenges.

2. The goal of the Interop Vendor Alliance is to foster interoperability across IT systems through collaboration, scenario-based testing, and communication.

3. Joining the Alliance is the latest in an ongoing series of initiatives from BEA to bridge the .NET and Java communities, and provide customers with the ability to build truly vendor-neutral solutions utilizing assets from across heterogeneous systems.

TechEd, IT Forum, Barcelona, Spain, and San Jose, Calif. — Nov. 14, 2006 — BEA Systems, Inc., a world leader in enterprise infrastructure, has extended its commitment to providing customers with vendor-neutral development capabilities by announcing its participation as a founding member of the newly formed Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA). BEA is working with a cross-industry group of member companies, including Microsoft, to help bridge the .NET and Java development paradigms with interoperable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based solutions.

“Interoperability between the Java and .NET platform is a significant area of interest for our customers”, said Ted Neward, an authority in Java and .NET technologies, particularly in the areas of Java/.NET integration, and author of several books, including Effective Enterprise Java. “Whether it’s a complex enterprise application seeking to integrate assets across both platforms or two small companies each looking to interact with the other as part of a growing business agreement, getting these two platforms to seamlessly share information is of prime importance. Having an industry forum set up to help deliver an improved interoperability experience can be a huge leap forward.”

BEA and Microsoft have collaborated on interoperability between Microsoft products and products from the BEA SOA 360° platform. The BEA SOA 360° 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 360°. (See Sept. 19, 2006, press release titled “BEA Announces SOA 360°; Industry’s most unified SOA Platform to transform and optimize business.”)

In addition, BEA has actively participated in the development of open standards and has participated in informal interoperability “Plug Fests” with Microsoft and other industry leaders. Today’s announcement broadens BEA’s commitment to interoperability by working with the Alliance to help formalize the technical and business collaboration efforts. This new level of coordination is designed to increase customer interoperability by supporting testing of its software in multi-vendor solutions.

“The Interop Vendor Alliance provides its members with a framework to collaborate on customer scenarios and improve the experience of operating in heterogeneous IT environments,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president, developer and platform evangelism group at Microsoft. “We look forward to working with BEA as a part of the Alliance to enhance interoperability and develop best practices for our mutual customers.”

"BEA believes believes the path forward for enterprise software lies in allowing developers to draw on a variety of industry-leading technologies to create business value,” said Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer, BEA Systems. “The Interop Vendor Alliance is designed to give us a great opportunity to build bridges between the .NET and Java paradigms and to enable customers to build the best composite business apps they can imagine.”

Joining the Alliance is the latest in an ongoing series of “Liquid Thinking” initiatives from BEA, working to provide customers with the ability to build truly vendor-neutral solutions, utilizing assets from across heterogeneous environments through SOA. For more information on SOA 360° and BEA’s participation in the Interop Vendor Alliance, please visit bea.com.

About the Interop Vendor Alliance

Formed in 2006, the Interop Vendor Alliance is an industry wide group working to identify and share opportunities to better connect people, data and diverse systems through better interoperability with Microsoft systems and to jointly market interoperability solutions of its members. Founding members include AMD, BEA Systems, Business Objects, CA, The Carbon Project, Centeris Corporation, Citrix Systems Inc, GXS, IP Commerce Inc, JNBridge, KERNEL Networks, Levi, Ray & Shoup Inc, Microsoft Corporation, NEC, Network Appliance, Novell, Q4bis, Quest Software, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Software AG, SugarCRM, Sun Microsystems, Symphony Services, Xcalia, and XenSource. Additional information about the Interop Vendor Alliance can be found on its Web site at interopvendoralliance.org.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA’s SOA 360° 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 bea.com.

Copyright © 2006 BEA Systems,Inc. All rights reserved. BEA, Tuxedo, WebLogic, BEA JRockit and BEA WebLogic Server are registered trademarks and BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, BEA WebLogic Integration, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA WebLogic Platform, BEA WebLogic Express, BEA WebLogic Workshop, BEA WebLogic Java Adapter for Mainframe, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, BEA eLink, Business LiquidITy, BEA microServices Architecture and BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security are trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. All other company and product names may be the subject of intellectual property rights reserved by third parties.

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Diana Wong

BEA Systems,Inc.

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