BEA Systems has unveiled BEA WebLogic SIP Server 2.1, the industry's first standards-based, carrier-grade, integrated J2EE and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) application server providing support for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), clustering-based high availability, and industry-leading high performance based on optimized SIP engine tier tuning. BEA WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 is designed to help telecommunications network operators accelerate the deployment of next-generation network architectures based on IMS and increase revenue by more readily capitalizing on IMS and next-generation service delivery opportunities.

Covalent Technologies announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with BEA. As a part of a blended approach to mixing and matching open source and commercial software, BEA plans to offer blended BEA WebLogic management and deployment technologies. The technologies will be designed to provide automated management and production-level support for customers using Apache Tomcat.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

Kapow Technologies, a leading web integration platform provider, announced Glenn Hasen as CEO. Operating out of Kapow's newly established headquarters in the Silicon Valley, Hasen will lead the company's rapid expansion into key domestic and international markets.

BEA Systems announced that the company plans to offer blended BEA WebLogic management and deployment technologies for customers using Apache Tomcat. BEA customers will now be able to have access to blended Apache Tomcat and BEA Weblogic servers. Apache Tomcat users will be able to take advantage of the BEA WebLogic Console with Apache Tomcat support.

SBAB has selected BEA to build a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This leading Swedish mortgage provider is launching a program to automate the processes used to manage relationships with its 250,000 customers.

Wily Technology, the leader in Enterprise Application Management, announced Wily 6, the latest generation of the most advanced solution for monitoring and improving the availability and performance of business-critical web applications.

BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, demonstrated at BEAWorld 2005 a version of BEA WebLogic Server that incorporates the industry's first hot-swappable application technology.

BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang characterizes the company's ConnecTerra acquisition as a logical development in a market in which many customers already use the respective companies' technologies in unison to solve business problems. With the acquisition, BEA is expected to bolster its approach to SOA deployments in an increasingly competitive space.

BEA has announced the acquisition of ConnecTerra, a privately-held pioneer in RFID middleware technology based in Cambridge, Mass. The acquisition is designed to immediately extend the range of the BEA infrastructure portfolio to easily integrate Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other device data.

BEA Systems announced it plans to ship an application server capable of delivering predictable real-time application responses to enterprise applications. The new product, BEA WebLogic Real Time Edition, will be available in Q4 2005.

BEA has announced that JRockit is 'hotter than ever before,' including hotter than Sun's HotSpot. When deploying SOA on a JVM, the company says, nothing comes close to matching the reliability, scalability, manageability and simplicity of JRockit. And BEA says it has the benchmarks to prove it. It's 'fast, stable and efficient,' said Vinit 'Vinny' Carpenter.

BEA opened its annual user conference, held this year in Santa Clara, CA, with numerous announcements about specific products, its SOA strategy, and activity by key technology and marketing partners.

RoboSuite 6.0 has the necessary functionality required to successfully deliver an application and content-rich enterprise portal, according to Kapow Technologies. The product is also the Web Integration platform for consuming and producing web services, which provides companies with the ability to either serve a portal with web services of known applications or consume web services from web-based third-party vendors. RoboSuite is deployed at more than 100 clients worldwide.

Valaran Corporation has appointed Rhonda Hocker, senior vice president and chief information officer of BEA, as Non-Executive Chairman of its board of directors. Hocker begins her non-executive chairman role after having served as a director with the company since August 2004.

StrongMail Systems has appointed as CTO industry veteran Peter Zadrozny, who has deep roots in enterprise software and is an expert on SOA, as well as being the founding editor of WLDJ. Zadrozny joins StrongMail Systems from Oracle, where he was VP and chief evangelist for Oracle's Java application server.

BEA Systems yesterday named John P. Giubileo as senior vice president, products operations, and Annie Shum, Ph.D., as vice president, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.

Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop integrates Crystal Reports' Java report processing and rendering capabilities with BEA WebLogic Workshop's JavaServer Page (JSP) development environment. It allows you to quickly and simply embed Crystal Reports within JSP applications, minimizing tedious hand coding of dynamic application data presentation.

Valaran Corporation, provider of a service-oriented platform for distributing and executing business logic on or near highly distributed edge devices, today announced that it has joined the growing list of companies in BEA Systems' Partner Program.

FullTilt Solutions, a leading provider of Enterprise Product Information Management (PIM) software solutions, today announced that it has joined the growing list of companies in the BEA Systems Partner Program.

'We feel fortunate, as a smaller vendor and BEA/Plumtree partner, to have been selected by both vendors originally,' he said. 'And so we think this merger is a really positive development for us and our joint clients with both BEA and Plumtree. These two companies combined cover about 20% of the global portal market, so in reality, this will make Kapow's technology a de facto standard for importing, or clipping, applications into portals.'

'BEA and Wily have an extensive, successful history of working together to deliver solutions that are designed to help drive and protect the performance of our customers' business,' said Larry Dino, Engineering Director at BEA Systems, Inc. 'Introscope is one of the leading application management solutions available today. With the validation for the full suite of WebLogic applications, and support for WebLogic 9, BEA customers can continue to select Wily Introscope with confidence to monitor their business critical WebLogic applications.'

'The combination makes BEA the number one multi-platform portal supplier in the world,' said BEA CEO Alfred Chuang. 'As I said in our earnings call last week, the portal is becoming the point of integration in the enterprise, and the portal is being used for dashboard, company care centers, employee cooperation and many other purposes,'

'Wily believes it's time to get real,' said Dick Williams, president and CEO of Wily Technology, Inc. 'Wily 6 provides end-to-end web application management that works in the real world. Critical business processes depend on applications running in highly complex heterogeneous environments. With Wily 6, we give our customers a single tool to understand in real-time the experience of real users and real transactions in those environments.'

The NetBeans Profiler is an add-on to NetBeans IDE adding a full-featured CPU, memory and threads profiling capabilities, . Visit http://profiler.net beans.org to download or get more information.

Java and non-Java application development will be featured in separate tracks at the upcoming BEA World 2005 in Santa Clara, CA. The JRockit track will be integrated into the event's overall WebLogic sessions.

BEA CEO Alfred Chuang will be among three keynote speakers at BEA World 2005, scheduled for September 27-29 in Santa Clara, CA. The event will then embark on a world tour of sorts, with dates scheduled in October for London, Paris, Prague and Tokyo, and a Beijing event scheduled in December.

Ryman's blog can be read at ryman.eclipsedeveloper sjournal.com. He is the latest i-technology celebrity whose blog is syndicated on SYS-CON's branded blog-n-play community pages next to James Gosling, Marc Fleury, Ben Forta, John C. Dvorak, Alan Williamson and others.

Genuitec, a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, has announced that MyEclipse 4.0 has completed its integration with BEA WebLogic Server 9.0. Genuitec can now assure customers that MyEclipse integrates with the recently announced application server from BEA Systems, Inc.

SoftArtisans has released version 3 of OfficeWriter featuring pure Application Objects for both Excel and Word. OfficeWriter is a complete server side Java library for reading and writing Microsoft Office documents. Libraries are simple to add to a variety of J2EE-compliant application servers, including Apache Tomcat, IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic.

BEA yesterday announced SPECjbb2005 benchmark results which show that JRockit has provided fastest per-CPU performance of a Java Virtual Machine for Server Side Applications running on Intel hardware.

Designed to converge the integration capabilities of an Enterprise Service Bus with operational service management in a single software product, BEA this week announced the general availability of the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.0 product, a key part of BEA's market-leading 'Service Infrastructure' product family.

BEA has now completed its acquisition of Compoze Software, Inc., a privately held company based in Wayne, PA.

webMethods debuted webMethods for Compliance, a new solution designed to verify the completeness, accuracy and validity of transactions and business processes in accordance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory requirements.

SolarMetric, makers of the Kodo product line, the leading standards-based, enterprise-quality object / relational mapping tools, will introduce Kodo for EJB 3 with support for the forthcoming Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 Persistence specification at the JavaOne 2005 conference in San Francisco, California from June 27th - June 30th.

Celebrating 10 years of Java innovation, BEA Systems, Inc. , a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced that the company is scheduled to host a plethora of activities at one of the world's largest software developer shows, including a keynote address, sneak previews of future innovations and over 25 interactive discussions to help shape the future of Java technology.

Following the recent announcement of BEA AquaLogic, a new family of products to help address the emerging Service Infrastructure software category, BEA Systems, Inc. , today named Rob Levy, 45, executive vice president, new products strategy. Levy is responsible for all aspects of the BEA AquaLogic product lines including research and development, product management, support, quality assurance, and strategic planning.

BEA has unveiled a new brand identity, corporate tagline and marketing campaign designed to raise the company's profile and to communicate its value proposition to IT customers. Its new tagline is 'Think Liquid' - coined to reflect BEA goal of being the leading independent provider of enterprise 'infrastructure software,' enabling the free flow of information, business processes and services within and across businesses.

'Many of the world's largest companies are moving down the path to SOA to take advantage of its enormous potential for cost saving and new business opportunities,' said Eric Pulier, SOA Software Inc. Chairman and Founder. 'As these companies move from pilot to production environments, they need to secure, manage and govern their SOA with a comprehensive Services Infrastructure. We share BEA's vision for enterprise SOA, and are excited to be able to offer our products as important components of the Service Infrastructure.'

In the first fiscal quarter of 2005, BEA signed more million-dollar license agreements, at a higher average size, than it has ever had before in a first quarter. Total revenues were $281.7 million, up 7% from $262.6 million in last year's first quarter.