BEA Unveils WebLogic Platform 7.0
Four products for business integration will be offered on a single CD.
Application server leader BEA Systems Inc. consolidated its J2EE offerings into a single product. It also publicized its new relationship with Hewlett-Packard Co., which ditched 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 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 are part of its Compaq acquisition: OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix and NonStop kernel. BEA said it would optimize WebLogic for these environments and future Itanium-based versions.