BEA Unveils WebLogic Platform 7.0

and agreement with HP

• By Chris McConnell
• 06/27/2002

Application server leader BEA Systems Inc. consolidated its J2EE offerings into a single product Tuesday. It also publicized its new relationship with Hewlett-Packard Co., which has abandoned its Bluestone application server in favor of BEA.

WebLogic Platform 7.0 will offer four BEA products for business integration on a single CD. The J2EE server WebLogic Server, portal framework WebLogic Portal, integration broker WebLogic Integration, and development environment WebLogic Workshop are now bundled in a single product, priced at $90,000 per CPU.

Wynn White, senior director of product marketing at BEA, says WebLogic Platform 7.0 is the first comprehensive application platform product, contrasting it with IBM Corp.’s WebSphere and Sun Microsystems Inc.’s SunONE. According to White, WebSphere and SunONE’s individual products have divergent and sometimes incompatible architectures.

WebLogic products share the same code base, eliminating the need for customers to write glue code between the constituent tools. “They already share the same architecture,” White says.

HP also said that it would resell BEA’s application server products, signaling the end of its Bluestone division. WebLogic will become the preferred application server for HP-UX, as well as the operating systems that came with its Compaq acquisition: OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix, and NonStop kernel. BEA said it would optimize WebLogic for these environments and future Itanium-based versions.

White said the HP agreement opens a huge opportunity for his company, stating, “It creates a massive channel for us.”

Moreover, HP said it would begin to train its sales and consulting staff on the WebLogic platform, pushing its clients to the platform for integration tasks. Conversely, BEA is making HP-UX and other HP operating systems a priority for its consulting staff.

WebLogic Platform 7.0 will be generally available this month for HP-UX, Solaris, Linux and Windows. BEA has mapped out versions for AIX, OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix, and NonStop kernel.