BEA Systems has announced the general availability of Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) 1.1, which is designed to allow Tuxedo-based applications to be exposed as Web services. SALT 1.1, a native Tuxedo Web-service stack built on an open-standard SOAP implementation, is designed to help enterprise architects creating mission-critical applications to safely modernize applications to Web services.

SALT 1.1 can help companies quickly move to Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) or .NET, as well as help reduce the costly process of rewriting or replacing code that was originally created in C, C++ or COBOL. Today’s announcement reaffirms BEA’s commitment to its primary mission, which is to provide the best end-to-end application infrastructure stack independent of database/data-store and enterprise application.

“We believe that all of our customers should have the ability to build flexible Web services and leverage their infrastructure of choice,” said Wai Wong, executive vice president, products, BEA Systems, Inc. “SALT is another example of our continued commitment to Tuxedo and to our customers who desire to build the needed pathways to SOA.”

Tuxedo is key component of the BEA SOA 360º platform. Announced today at BEAWorld 2006, the BEA SOA 360º platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic, Tuxedo and the company’s newly unveiled SOA collaborative tooling environment, BEA Workspace 360º.

Like BEA WebLogic Server’s native Web-services capability that sits on top of Java or open source frameworks, SALT runs on top of Tuxedo, helping to allow for the creation of Web services using Tuxedo-based applications. The product is geared towards Fortune 1000 companies with mission-critical enterprise IT departments in the fields of financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, government and transportation that typically rely on Tuxedo applications as the backbone for transaction processing.

"SALT provides us with a practical and cost effective migration path to SOA. As a beta customer for SALT, we were pleased with how easy it was to get the product up and running fairly quickly,” said Mariska Hoogenboom, software construction engineer at Kadaster. “Thanks to SALT’s ease of installation and configuration, it took us less than two hours to get SOAP services going, greatly exceeding our expectations of the product.”