Marking its entry into its second decade, BEA used a major product launch event at the NASDAQ MarketSite to unveil its 'Enterprise Liquid Assets' vision.

"The days of business silos and software smokestacks are coming to an end," said Alfred Chuang, BEA's chairman and chief executive officer. He continued:

"We envision a world where each one of us will have our own personal 'Service Networks' to help us maximize our productivity, without needing to cobble together scraps of information gathered through dozens of phone calls, requests from corporate databases and hours of spreadsheet work. To get there, we have to move our technology from the IT smokestacks of yesterday, to the IT assembly lines of tomorrow. It's time to stop hard-coding and time to start composing and helping customers realize the benefits of Enterprise Liquid Assets."

The new vision and strategy are designed to help business customers accelerate the delivery of business, IT, personal and professional services to improve enterprise productivity, says the company. The vision aims to help companies free previously isolated or "frozen" IT assets so they become "liquid assets" that combine the power of software applications and the Internet, across both .NET and Java platforms.

Based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), BEA's vision of Enterprise Liquid Assets calls for applying new technologies and pervasive Internet standards to break down the barriers that separate finance from manufacturing, business from IT, consumers from companies, and the personal from the professional.

To fuel the Enterprise Liquid Assets vision for customers, BEA has announced a "service infrastructure" product famil, including products and tools to help enable services to be composed once and leveraged anywhere (COLA), across both .NET and Java platforms.

Primarily used by IT and business architects, the software will help IT departments overcome a multi-billion dollar problem of integrating different types of systems.

While 'service infrastructure' may be a new term, it combines several existing software tools and component products that reflect the growing popularity of SOA and Web services. Over time, BEA believes the category will include all the capabilities for full operation and lifecycle management of business and IT services across mixed environments, including messaging, data integration, security, process, portal and composition product lines.

Market research firm IDC's preliminary forecast for worldwide total software related to SOA will grow to nearly USD $9 billion by 2009 with a 75 percent five-year compound annual growth rate.

BEA believes the service infrastructure market is distinct from - and additional to - its current core market of application infrastructure, which provides the server software foundation for building and deploying enterprise applications.

"As the pioneer in application infrastructure, BEA is well-positioned to deliver the robust service infrastructure to help make SOA a reality for customers," said Chuang. "We have deep experience, customer relationships and proven technology on our side. And unlike vendors with a vested interest in database, application and operating system platforms, we can provide our customers with the independent platforms and broad integration they need to knit together diverse technologies - an independence which becomes even more critical in the world of SOA."

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