New Tuxedo owner BEA Systems Inc (CI No 2,897) launched itself into Europe last week by acquiring the largest supplier of Tuxedo on the continent, Unix System Labs France SA, based in Paris, from Novell Inc. Financial details were not revealed, but the firm inherits 70 sales and support employees. On the back of the acquisition, BEA offices in London and Munich will also be opened. Novell has now completely sold out its Unix interests (CI No 2,757), but the firm retains the right to develop the Tuxedo for NetWare systems. Sunnyvale, California-based BEA Systems is sovereign of all the other versions, including Unix, Windows NT and MVS. On a four-day tour of Europe, ex-Sun Microsystems Inc vice-president Ed Scott and ex-Novell vice-president Joe Menard sketched out the company’s plans for Tuxedo. Menard, who is relocating to Brussels to be become senior vice-president for Europe, is keen to break Tuxedo out of its transaction processing monitor hole. The idea is to position the technology as middleware for transaction processing for those that want it and, more importantly, as a messaging manager for applications in distributed computing environments. In these clothes it envisages Tuxedo competing with HP OpenMail and IBM Corp’s MQSeries. Tuxedo has message buffers for applications to exchange information, name services that enable transparent connections between application logic to be set up, and its infamous transaction capabilities, which guarantee message delivery.
Embedding Tuxedo
But Tuxedo is not all that is on offer from BEA Systems. The company is also developing BEA CICx, a CICS personality for Tuxedo, which will give users a complete CICS look and feel- compatible monitor. For management there is BEA Manager, which enables application logic to be monitored across distributed environments and BEA Connect, which integrates Tuxedo with legacy systems using bi-directional communications, TCP/IP and LU.62 protocols. On the application development side, BEA Systems is offering BEA Builder, which is a component-based middleware framework. This, according to the company, enables independent software vendors to embed Tuxedo in distributed application development environments and BEA Systems says that Tuxedo will work with products from Dynasty Technologies Inc, JYACC Inc, Borland International Inc’s Delphi and Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic. For the future, Menard says that BEA research and development is currently working on advancing security and administration capabilities, and improving connections to CICS and IMS applications.
