BEAWORLD 2005 BEIJING, Dec. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- As part of its "Think liquid" strategy for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), BEA Systems, Inc. today announced its vision for how portal technologies are evolving to provide companies a business interaction platform for creating interactive portals, collaborative communities and composite applications in an open environment, spanning rival operating systems, application servers and programming environments.

BEA also previewed plans for future releases of WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction (formerly the Plumtree Corporate Portal) and introduced several planned new products. Over the next two years, BEA plans to combine aspects of the WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic product families to provide common portal infrastructure services, application services and tools that can be used with future versions of both WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction. This approach can provide all existing portal customers with a natural upgrade path that is planned to be backward compatible with the most recent prior releases and further enhances the value of investments in BEA portal technologies by allowing them to leverage a common set of services across both portal products and other Web applications.

"BEA's vision for a business interaction platform combines the right enabling technologies to help customers solve increasingly complex business challenges. This platform will fundamentally change the way work gets done in an organization by helping transform services and content into real world service-oriented business applications," said Mark Carges, executive vice president, BEA Systems, Inc. "As a result, customers using BEA's portal-based solution will be able to better meet changing business needs and integrate existing systems and resources, ultimately helping them improve business processes and increase productivity."

From Two Portals to One Powerful User Experience Framework

BEA's unified portal strategy will blend the strengths of both WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction, into a single, cross-platform environment for user experience and business interaction. Currently, WebLogic Portal simplifies the production and management of custom-fit Java portals while AquaLogic Interaction simplifies the integration and interface development for cross-platform portals and Web applications. The unified portal roadmap will evolve over three phases:

-- Phase One -- Interoperability: Phase one enhances interoperation between WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction for sharing portlets and other page elements between the products. BEA will release a unified JSR-168 (Java Specification Request) implementation based on the Java Community standard and a unified WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) implementation based on the Java and OASIS standards, which BEA helped define. Both portal products will use the unified WSRP implementation to produce WSRP portlets that can be consumed by any WSRP-compliant portal. Both portal products already support these standards, but phase one will allow customers using both WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction to more easily share assets between portals, including services offered by the AquaLogic Activity Servers for usage analytics, collaboration, publishing and search. These capabilities are planned to be made available in the first half of 2006; -- Phase Two -- Componentization and Common Services: Phase two focuses on componentizing a number of discrete capabilities into a set of common services. These include: portal infrastructure services; activity services like collaboration, search, distributed publishing and usage analytics; higher-level portal features for creating communities, group pages, content aggregation and knowledge management; and developer and business user tools. These services can be used with either WebLogic Portal or AquaLogic Interaction or used independent of a portal. BEA plans to release a series of new products that independently package these common services so that customers have the flexibility to use portal infrastructure and application services with any Web application, not just portal applications These products are further described below and are planned for release throughout the second half of 2006; -- Phase Three -- Unification: Phase three will unify common portal infrastructure components and services into a single environment used for managing a broad range of user experiences over the Web, including portals and composite applications. This environment will be supported on multiple platforms, including Microsoft Windows, commercial Unix and Linux, and multiple application servers, including Microsoft .NET, IBM WebSphere, Tomcat and the industry's leading J2EE application server, BEA WebLogic Server. Separate tools will exist for both developers and business users to create assets that the environment will consume and assemble into portals, composite applications or other Web experiences. Existing WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction customers will both have a natural upgrade path to this powerful new environment. The unified portal infrastructure services is planned for release in 2007.

The final result is a common set of portal infrastructure services that future versions of both the WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction will share. BEA will continue to offer unique packaging of these universal portal infrastructure services within its WebLogic and AquaLogic product families to provide customers different configurations to meet their preferred development approach and their preferred deployment approach on J2EE, Microsoft .NET or mixed environments of application servers. This also provides customers the ability to leverage the right universal activity services and tools to meet their business requirements for enterprise portals, collaborative communities or composite applications.

"The unified portal strategy is designed to help BEA customers understand how they can use the AquaLogic User Interaction and WebLogic Portal products today and in the future," said Wai Wong, executive vice president, BEA Systems, Inc. "It also outlines how enterprises will benefit from the increased flexibility that is provided from common portal infrastructure components, activity services and unified tools that will help solve complex business challenges that require BEA's WebLogic, AquaLogic or combined portal technologies."

New Planned Products Offer Broader Reach, Expanded Capabilities

Also, today BEA announced a series of new planned products within its AquaLogic User Interaction product line that will interoperate with WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction. In addition, these products will provide portable portal infrastructure services, allowing those features to interoperate freely with Web applications or any portal framework, including those from BEA's competitors. The planned products include:

-- Project "Runner" -- A rapid application services and composition engine, which makes underlying portal infrastructure and activity services available to non-portal applications. Runner will support the creation of new composite applications, and will complement existing portal-based applications. Customers will use this product to integrate and unify activity services for usage analytics, security and identity management, collaboration, distributed publishing and web content management, search and knowledge management, interaction management and commerce into applications running on heterogeneous systems without requiring extensive rewrites or conformance to a single common architecture or user experience. This simplified and extensible development approach provides customers the benefits of portal infrastructure and activity services without requiring the use of a portal framework and allows customers more flexibility to leverage their investment in BEA portal technologies across their enterprise; -- Project "Holland" -- An enterprise application wiki that enables business users and other non-developers to collaborate on the creation of interactive workspaces, group pages and portal communities, populated through an extensible library of reusable page components, data connectors, and workflows. In a single, unified user experience, this product enables participants to switch seamlessly between collaborating on the creation of new applications and workspaces, and using those spaces as part of their daily work. These group-driven spaces can be deployed within their own federated network of sites or dynamically plugged into existing portal frameworks. This product brings the power of community-building to a broader set of participants, democratizing the restricted capabilities found in most portal products and turning a one-to-many relationship between the people that build applications and those that consume them into a many-to-many relationship. This product combines community creation features found in the portal frameworks with end-user features for publishing content and creating business services found in AquaLogic Interaction Publisher, AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration and AquaLogic Interaction Studio; -- Project "Graffiti" -- A collaborative information discovery and knowledge management system, used to classify and discover content stored in any corporate content repository, from Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint to Lotus Notes and Windows file systems. Within this system users classify content by creating personal content labels, or "tags," organizing the content into personally meaningful classifications. The system pools individual classifications into group classifications and makes suggestions about what content might be useful to an individual user by combing usage patterns and analytics. Customers will use this product to help their users more effectively discover useful information, regardless of its format and where it is stored. Users will more readily find useful information by learning what their colleagues find useful and content will be categorized more effectively by leveraging the actual lingua franca of each business.

The three products described above are all planned for release in the second half of 2006. For more information, visit bea.com/aqualogic.

Considered the first, and often the most visible, major application in a new service-enabled enterprise, the portal platform is an important step forward for the continued success of practical SOA adoption within organizations and addresses an emerging category of enterprise software -- Service Infrastructure.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, providing standards-based platforms to accelerate the secure flow of information and services. BEA product lines -- WebLogic(R), Tuxedo(R), JRockit(R), and the new AquaLogic(TM) family of Service Infrastructure -- help customers reduce IT complexity and successfully deploy Service-Oriented Architectures to improve business agility and efficiency. For more information, please visit bea.com.

Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the statements in this press release are forward-looking, including the statements regarding the evolution of BEA's products and BEA's strategy for the acceleration of the adoption of SOA, customer's ability to enhance the value of investments in BEA portal technologies by allowing such customers to leverage a common set of services across both portal products and other Web applications, and new products scheduled for release and the ways in which such products may address the Service Infrastructure opportunity, the benefits of horizontally integrated "Service Networks," the benefits of AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1 and AquaLogic Service Registry(TM) and other features and the benefits of BEA's future products. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially include risks associated with: any unforeseen changes in the technology, standards or marketplace for enterprise information integration software; the timing of a recovery from the current economic and IT industry downturn; any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the development BEA's solutions; and any software errors related to BEA's solutions. Readers should also refer to the risk disclosures set forth in BEA's 10-Q for the quarter ended October 31, 2005 as filed with the SEC and subsequent reports filed thereafter by BEA from time-to-time with the SEC. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are made as of the date hereof, and BEA does not assume any obligation to update such statements nor the reasons why actual results could differ materially from those projected in such statements.

NOTE: BEA, Tuxedo, WebLogic, and BEA WebLogic Server are registered trademarks and BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, BEA WebLogic Integration, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA WebLogic JRockit, BEA WebLogic Platform, BEA WebLogic Express, BEA WebLogic Workshop, BEA WebLogic Java Adapter for Mainframe, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, BEA eLink 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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