BEA Systems announced its entry into Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) with a new product offering designed to enable event-driven SOA in Java environments. BEA WebLogic Event Server is the first and only Java application server optimized to handle large volumes of streaming data, predictable real-time response requirements and complex event processing (CEP). Until now, being able to manage these types of event requirements in real time and with high predictability has not been possible in Java. As it did with its real-time and virtualization technologies, BEA brings Java to new frontiers once again with WebLogic Event Server (http://www.bea.com/eventserver), successfully addressing these issues while delivering the productivity, adaptability and cost benefits uniquely afforded by Java.

A significant benefit of BEA's approach is that, unlike competitors with standalone CEP engines, WebLogic Event Server is a lightweight but full- featured application server platform with event features built in, enabling customers to build their applications on the platform without having to integrate a CEP engine with a separate general-purpose platform. Starting with the product's complete infrastructure, customers avoid much overhead and can bring new event-driven applications to market quickly. This approach also makes it easier to add event-oriented functionality to existing applications.

The company's move into EDA underscores and addresses the growing pressure on organizations to consume the high proliferation of data flooding into enterprises today -- data which is often unpredictable and complex -- and make instant and insightful business decisions that will yield the greatest return in new revenue streams, customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation. This pressure is compounded by the need to achieve greater efficiencies throughout the enterprise. However, applications today don't support the scale needed to manage these new requirements and are being written in languages like C/C++ which can be quite costly.

WebLogic Event Server offers the ability to handle a high volume of complex events with the speed and predictability that are expected in C/C++ but at the much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of Java. WebLogic Event Server, combined with BEA WebLogic Real Time (http://www.bea.com/realtime) and BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (http://www.bea.com/virtualization), not only brings key capabilities for event-driven SOA but also provides the rock-solid foundation critical to enabling the deployment of large-scale business-critical applications on mainstream hardware known as extreme transaction processing (XTP).

"WebLogic Event Server plays a foundational role in an event-driven architecture, SOA and into the extreme transaction space at the top of the illities scale where BEA is known and dominates," said Guy Churchward, Vice President of WebLogic Products at BEA Systems, Inc. "We expect interest and adoption of event-driven SOA to explode over the coming months and believe that BEA, as the only platform vendor to offer high performance, complex event processing capabilities for Java, is in a unique position to take full advantage of this market opportunity."

WebLogic Event Server aggregates information from distributed systems in real time and applies rules to discern patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. This gives companies the ability to model, identify, anticipate and instantly respond to opportunities and threats represented by seemingly unrelated events. The product serves as an infrastructure for certain key aspects of SOA, enabling high-performance computing without modification of current or planned SOA infrastructure, thereby allowing companies to maximize the investments they already have in place. In addition, WebLogic Event Server provides XTP support, delivering high throughput, high predictability and real-time response to help companies meet rigorous service level agreements (SLAs). The product provides support for simple Java (POJO) programming and the Spring Framework, as well as an Event Processing Language (EPL) that augments and extends SQL in defining the temporal rules and non- linear rule application critical for event processing.

WebLogic Event Server is the first BEA product to be completely based on the company's microService Architecture (mSA)(http://www.bea.com/msa), a component architecture designed to be open, interoperable, embeddable and naturally extensible for third-party development. mSA is the underlying architecture behind BEA SOA 360°. Announced last Fall, SOA 360° spans BEA's three product families - BEA AquaLogic(R) (http://www.bea.com/aqualogic), BEA WebLogic (http://www.bea.com/weblogic) and BEA Tuxedo(R) (http://www.bea.com/tuxedo) -- and is designed for business transformation and optimization in order to improve cost structures and grow revenue streams.