BEA BUNDLES EAI SOLUTION; INTEGREATES WEBLOGIC AND M3.

BEA Systems Inc wants a piece of the burgeoning enterprise application integration market and has glued a couple of third- party EAI products from TSI Software and InConcert to its Tuxedo OLTP middleware to create Elink. There are six modules; the Elink server, which includes TSI's procedural-based Mercator message broker; advanced and entry versions of Elink for SAP R/3; and three Elinks for SNA, TCP/IP and OSI-TP  mainframe connections. InConcert is providing business process workflow management. BEA says it will create vertical industry and other application- specific versions of Elink during 1999. BEA said last year it would build the pipes for EAI but partner for the connector. It already resells TSI's software as BEA Connect. As we revealed last year (CI No 3,557), BEA yesterday told its annual user group meeting that Enterprise Java Beans will be its key component development environment and that its will ensure users will be able to use EJB seamlessly with OMG's Corba component model. As previously indicated, it's also going to merge its WebLogic application server with the Tuxedo-based M3 object transaction middleware under the WebLogic Enterprise brand, demonstrating just how important the WebLogic acquisition will be to its business. There will be im plementations for various development tiers. WebLogic Server is what used to be called Tengah, the core WebLogic applications server, while WebLogic Express is the new name for the Tengah/JDBC low-end server which generates web pages from database queries. Versions 4.0 of each of these products are available now. WebLogic Express and Server support Java. WebLogic Enterprise supports Corba for C++, Java and Tuxedo APIs. A 4.1 cut of WebLogic Enterprise will offer EJB-Corba interoperability within 90 days. A 5.0 version due late 1999 is a merged product supporting Java, EJB, Corba for C++ and Java and Tuxedo. It's going to promote Versant Corp's EJB enterprise container which enables the WebLogic server to connect to Versant's object database. BEA licensed the Versant object database for use with its middleware last year.