BEA forms Siebel-IBM love triangle. (CRM News Review).BEA Systems BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is one of the major companies developing enterprise infrastructure software. BEA makes middleware, products that help software run on top of databases. Inc has joined an application integration troika with Java rival IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Corp centered on customer relationship management (CRM (Customer Relationship Management) An integrated information system that is used to plan, schedule and control the presales and postsales activities in an organization. ) specialist Siebel Systems Siebel is a brand name of Oracle Corporation. Siebel Systems, Inc., founded by Thomas Siebel in 1993, was principally engaged in the design, development, marketing and support of CRM applications. Inc. Siebel is today expected to announce BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 will use an implementation of Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS See WSBPEL. ) to provide out-of-the box support for Siebel's UAN UAN - User Action Notation. A notation from VPI for representation of activity in a graphical user interface. [H. Hartson et al, ACM Trans on Info Sys, July 1990]. business process platform. UAN, or Universal Application Network, will provide a framework to write business process while application integration is actually performed by WebLogic Integration 8.1. The companies will jointly market and sell the technologies. The deal follows through on a partnership, announced last October, when Siebel named BEA BEA - Basic programming Environment for interactive-graphical Applications, from Siemens-Nixdorf. as a strategic software partner who would deliver UAN and web services-based integration systems. BEA was penciled-in to provide the integration technology and Siebel the best-practice business processes. The partnership is a shrewd play by Siebel which, like many software vendors today, wishes to minimize the amount of unique coding customers must do to install, integrate or customize its software when running with third-parties' software or existing legacy systems. BEA senior vice president of business development Morris Beton claimed 40% of application development work is devoted to the mundane task of integration. "We are providing technology that bypasses the coding required to do integration," he said. "BEA provides the infrastructure to integrate at the application level, and Siebel provides the framework to integrate at the business process level." By aligning itself with BEA, Siebel has backed one of the two leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) A platform from Sun for building distributed enterprise applications. J2EE services are performed in the middle tier between the user's machine and the enterprise's databases and legacy information systems. ) vendors who are seeking to convert their dominant application server position into a similar advantage in integration. BEA is using WebLogic Integration 8.1, part of the WebLogic Platform that also includes WebLogic Server--BEA's J2EE application server. Siebel wants to ensure broad support among J2EE users, though, and last year signed a UAN pact with BEA's biggest J2EE rival and joint application server market leader, IBM. Siebel agreed to license IBM's business process templates and common object models for development and delivery of a pre-built customer-driven business process library that is a key component of UAN. Customers using Siebel's point-to-point connectors to integrate to third-party applications are also offered the opportunity to migrate to UAN-based offerings built on the IBM WebSphere Business Integration platform. Siebel vice president and general manager of UAN Bharath Kadaba said the market-leading positions of BEA and IBM meant it is important for Siebel to support both company's J2EE infrastructures. "Customers are typically buying one or the other... we have to work with both," Kadaba said. For it's part, BEA is working with other enterprise application vendors to embed its integration software into the fabric of customers' IT infrastructure. Beton, a 16 year-veteran of IBM and ex-Microsoft Corp employee, said BEA is working with enterprise resource planning See ERP. (application, business) Enterprise Resource Planning - (ERP) Any software system designed to support and automate the business processes of medium and large businesses. (ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. ) specialist PeopleSoft Inc to also tackle integration. He said this would take a different approach to the work BEA has adopted with Siebel, but would not go into details. "It will be based around very different activities. It's hard to cookie cutter this kind of stuff," he said. |
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