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.

'Service-Oriented Architecture for Executives,' the first BEA suite of SOA Services for senior IT executives, is launching this week - the only set of professional services built for executives from the ground up and based on BEA's experience with SOA at Global 2400 companies.

BEA Systems , a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the availability of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Executives, the first BEA suite of SOA services for senior IT executives. This suite is designed to help empower executives to invest in SOA and lead change within their organizations by conveying the business value of SOA through BEA's sensible approach. BEA is scheduled to debut education course modules from the SOA for Executives services during a pre-conference workshop at BEAWorld 2006 on Monday, September 18th at 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. in San Francisco's Moscone Center.

'There is no question that a repository is a key enabler for SOA, and the Flashline repository will serve as the basis for providing a more unified environment for SOA,' said Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer, BEA Systems, as BEA announced yesterday that it had acquired Flashline, Inc., an industry leader in the metadata repository market.

'Customers tell us that they are increasingly realizing the value and critical role our application infrastructure products play in transforming their businesses,' explained BEA's senior vice president and CMO, Marge Breya, as it was announced that BEA was positioned in the leaders quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers (EAS) in Gartner's 2Q06 report.

'Quest is proud to have the opportunity to build on the company's long and successful infrastructure management history with the Army,' said Paul Garver, vice president of Quest Software Public Sector, as Quest Software Inc. this week announced that the company has been selected to provide Windows infrastructure management solutions for the U.S. Army in a limited enterprise agreement awarded as part of the Department of Defense (DoD) Enterprise Software Initiative.

BEA Systems has been recognized by its solution-provider partners and readers of CMP Technology's VARBusiness for the outstanding satisfaction levels that it provides to them and has been lauded in the Annual Report Card (ARC) award program. The company received top honors for Product Innovation in the Web/SOA Infrastructure and Integration Software Category from the biweekly magazine that provides strategic insight to technology integrators, at an awards ceremony held on Aug. 15, at the XChange '06 Conference in St. Louis.

'The BEA WebLogic product family continues to lead the market with excellent growth and innovation in the market,' said Wai Wong, executive vice president, BEA Systems, Inc. 'The new releases of WebLogic Portal, WebLogic Server and Workshop for WebLogic are designed to accelerate the service-driven enterprise by helping to enable IT to simplify and unify the development and deployment of enterprise assets.'

BEA Systems has announced that WebLogic Server 8.1 SP5 has been granted Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) Common Criteria Certification. Achieving this certification is a key milestone in that it enables BEA to sell into government agencies worldwide where customers are mandated to purchase products that are Common Criteria-certified.

The WebLogic-Eclipse plug-in is designed to run the WebLogic Server from the Eclipse IDE. With the WebLogic-Eclipse plug-in, the WebLogic Server gets started and stopped from Eclipse. An application deployed in the WebLogic Server can be debugged from Eclipse with the plug-in. By installing the WebLogic plug-in in Eclipse the WebLogic Server can be configured and administered from the Eclipse IDE by setting the server classpath and JVM options in Eclipse.

'There are some important improvements to infrastructure (with BEA Workshop 3.2),' writes BEA VP Bill Roth in a recent blog entry. 'Libraries for Hibernate, Kodo, Spring and Struts are downloaded on first use. This means that you do not have to agree to licenses for these features unless and until you choose to use them in a project.'

BEA was named a leader in the enterprise service bus (ESB) space. Forrester defines an ESB as 'an intermediary that makes a set of reusable business services widely available.' According to the report, ?the total value of the BEA solution is most compelling when the customer uses multiple BEA products to provide a complete SOA environment.

'Customers want a service and support program that can comprehensively address the long-term needs of their organizations,' said Terry Clearkin, senior vice president, Worldwide Support Services,' BEA Systems, Inc. 'By further enhancing the Customer First support policy, we can help our customers to have more control over their upgrade schedules and providing comprehensive support can help ensure quality service over the life of their applications.'

Targeting the need of insurers to integrate legacy systems, implement business process management, orchestrate business services, and monitor business transactions, the two companies have agreed to jointly deliver proven SOA solutions tailored specifically for the insurance industry. Several prototypes, testing the processes and evaluating the productivity gains of the joint solution, have already been launched by customers in Asia, Europe and the US.

BEA Systems has announced continued momentum in the public sector with new state and local government customers selecting the BEA AquaLogic User Interaction products for its collaborative and service-oriented platform. As the public sector strives to manage the myriad of transactions between citizens and their government to effectively serve the people, they can no longer justify unnecessary duplication of infrastructure that could otherwise be shared and can turn to BEA technology to aid in their adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

'Java-driven code quality' was the topic of discussion during a recent SYS-CON.TV Power Panel discussion held at the Reuters studio overlooking Times Square in New York. Moderated by SYS-CON Publishing Director Jeremy Geelan, the panel featured industry analyst Judith Hurwitz of Hurwitz and Associates, Enerjy Software CEO Nigel Cheshire, Instantiations CEO Mike Taylor, Mark Lambert from Parasoft, and Barry Mullan from Agitar Software.

Cassatt(R) Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software and services to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced general availability of the Cassatt Collage(TM) Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM). This product enables efficient and reliable server consolidation by providing unified, automated management for both physical and virtual machines (VMs). XVM helps customers rein in the growing problem of 'virtual machine sprawl,' using a vendor-neutral architecture to automate control across virtual servers from multiple sources, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft.

Cassatt Corp., an innovator in providing enterprise software for agile IT infrastructure, today announced that CEO Bill Coleman will deliver the opening keynote for SYS-CON's 10th International SOA Web Services Edge Conference on Mon., June 5 at 8 a.m. EDT at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Coleman's speech on 'Software Isn't IT Anymore' will examine how recent developments in the software industry -- including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and open source -- are changing the existing model of software development, driving an eventual convergence of the Internet service provider (ISP), cable, Internet portal, and telecommunications industries.

BEA's newly appointed Deputy CTO, Theo Beack, is tasked with looking into what's happening in Web 2.0 and SOA, as part of the company's evolving 'blended' application development strategy. Beack discusses his new role in this exclusive SYS-CON interview.

Cassatt is enabling IT organizations -- starting with those running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1-based applications -- to change their assumptions about the return they can get on their IT investments,' said Bill Coleman , chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corporation, yesterday as Cassatt announced general availability of the new Cassatt Collage Web Automation Module (WAM), software that helps IT organizations with their server consolidation efforts by providing Java application virtualization and management for Java EE applications.

BEA Systems and Interface21 announced that that two companies are collaborating to provide increased support for the recently approved Java Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) standard. As part of this announcement, the companies have released an open source project that is designed to provide features and tooling to make programming enterprise Java easier.

It's Day Two of JavaOne and I am covering the Oracle Keynote to see how they spin their Fusion vision today. Preparations for our Keynote are going well and we're getting good visibility . The keynote started out with an obilgatory corporate video, with the tag line 'Start in the Middle'. John Gage came up and did his usual MC routine, pointing out that there are 56 hours left, and his usual poll of the audience. He expressed fascination with an afternoon session with concurrency and double-ended queues. Gage then exhorted folks to go see the the slot-care racing demo, which is an example of real-time Java, i.e. deterministic Java.

John Gage did his usual MC, routine. Then Jonathan Schwartz came on stage, and started off by somewhat inexplicably offered a download of hardware, the new Niagra boxes. He then brought Ed Zander on stage, who was in town for the Gartner symposium. Ed was the former COO of Sun, and current CEO of Motorola.

Benchmarks can mean whatever you want them to mean, it has always seemed. Although useful as a rough guide to performance, and sometimes price/performance, technology companies are famous for interpreting complex benchmark results as victories over their competition and them employing visual aids such as planes, snails, and automobiles to demonstrate their point.

After BEA's announcement regarding their release of the BlueDragon BEA WebLogic Server, SYS-CON Media had the chance to talk with Blake Connell.

The Adobe LiveCycle server platform, which runs on BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and JBoss, has been enhanced and ­ beginning September 19, for a subscription fee of US $1495 for one year­ developers can receive access to Adobe LiveCycle software, support for building custom applications and regular communications from the Adobe engineering and developer teams.

'Developers want the ability to mix-and-match the best components and deployment platforms that give them optimal and unique building blocks to get their jobs done,' said Peter Cooper-Ellis, EVP of BEA, as Covalent Technologies and BEA announced they have entered into a strategic partnership. As a part of a blended approach to mixing and matching open source and commercial software, BEA Systems plans to offer blended BEA WebLogic management and deployment technologies.

Back in the day, the real decision on what to announce during JavaOne didn't really happen until the week before the show. (They could use it as a forum to announce their new CEO, but I will stay away from that one.) However, if I had to bet on what Sun will announce, I would put my money on them trying copy the work we are doing (again) - this time on Blended.

The first 'Real-World AJAX' event, held in New York City, featured 15 speakers in 11 sessions, including many of the the world's most renowned AJAX experts, and more than 400 delegates attended while more than 15,000 SYS-CON.TV viewers tuned into the simulcast on March 13, 2006. Backbase news blog called it 'a great day, and certainly the first major Ajax Event in the World!' Today, just ten weeks on, 'Real-World AJAX' comes to Silicon Valley, to San Jose at its heart. The speaker lineup is if anything even more stellar than it was in NYC, including Google's Adam Bosworth and Paul Rademacher, Yahoo!'s Eric Miraglia, and the father of the term 'AJAX' himself, Jesse James Garrett.

The advent of AJAX as a Web application model is significantly changing the traffic profile seen on the server side. The typical Web pattern usage of a user sitting idle on a Web page filling out fields and hitting the submit button to the next link is now transforming into sophisticated client-side JavaScript and rich user interfaces that constantly communicate with the server whenever an event is posted on a form such as a checkbox click, key press, or tab focus.

BEA has announced the availability of BlueDragon, BEA WebLogic Edition. BlueDragon is designed to help enable customers to modernize and extend legacy ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) applications to run on BEA WebLogic Server, thereby allowing companies to reuse existing technology to help meet evolving business needs.

Compuware Corporation introduced the new version of its QACenter Enterprise Edition functional testing solution, Compuware TestPartner 5.4. This new release offers a tight functional testing integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System and support for the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. By enabling development and testing teams to access the same testing assets to resolve errors more quickly, Compuware TestPartner improves communication and collaboration, allowing IT organizations to deliver high-quality applications more cost effectively.

Most non-trivial applications involve high degrees of concurrency and many layers of abstraction. Concurrency is associated with resource contention and an increase in deadlock conditions. The multiple layers of abstraction make it more difficult to isolate and fix the deadlock conditions.

BEA has released the beta version of its WebLogic Platform 9.2, which includes WebLogic Server, WebLogic Portal, and BEA Workshop for WebLogic platform.

I'm the 'tech chair' of SYS-CON's 10th annual SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I've invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won't regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

Typical enterprise IT environments have as much as 90% of their hardware and software resources sitting idle at any given time, in anticipation of usage spikes. The Cassatt software, called Collage, creates a dynamic, virtual pool of resources that business applications can draw from, using existing software, servers, and networks. Cassatt then uses goal-driven automation to manage and optimize these resources. The result is ?service level automation?: Cassatt enables IT departments to deliver the application service levels to support and grow business ? even under tight budget restrictions ? by automatically leveraging previously wasted computing resources.

With the advent of BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1, a host of new technologies was introduced. These are, among others: Java Page Flow with annotations, Java Controls, and a new IDE to support it. Online tutorials were also thrown into the package to show how the new technologies were supposed to be put to work in the most effective way.

WebLogic Server 9.0 is the most significant BEA Java application server release to date. Fully compliant with J2EE 1.4, this release tackles head-on the biggest challenge facing enterprise networks today: reducing overall cost of management and operations while delivering high reliability, continuous uptime, scalability, and mission-critical integration solutions.

This article describes a workaround design that allows a Portal to survive if its resource starts hanging request threads. How frequently does your Portal experience user requests hanging in the resource? Not frequently, I hope. However, if this happens and the resource continues hanging user requests, the Portal is exposed to a fatal risk of spending all of the configured concurrent user requests and eventually dies.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. , the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today announced a series of accolades from both the Java Developer's Journal (JDJ) and SOA Web Services Journal Reader's Choice Awards. Sun products and technologies were recognized as winners for three categories of the JDJ awards, and nine categories of the SOA Web Services awards.