The company is unveiling the BEA Enterprise Solutions program featuring five so-called BEA Solutions Frameworks that target customer service, employee service, service delivery, trade processing, and Radio Frequency Identity (RFID).
The frameworks feature software, sales and marketing tools, and services that the company said would help accelerate customers’ ability to innovate in these five areas. The company is targeting telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, retail, logistics and government.
BEA’s targeting of vertical sectors follows a shake-up in sales and a management re-organization earlier this year, intended to provide the company with a sharper focus on telecos, government, manufacturing and finance. In May, BEA chief executive Alfred Chuang said vertical packages would provide an entrace into customers, enabling the company to sell more licenses of the precious WebLogic Platform.
Mark Atheron, vice president of BEA’s enterprise solutions group, launching the Enterprise Solutions package, said: These five [offerings] came to market because we could see these were major trends in industries where we are strong. We will continue out with this model.
While strong in many sectors – BEA has 15,000 high profile and not so-well-known customers including Virgin Atlantic airlines and Wells Fargo bank – the company has been relatively late behind its biggest middleware competitor IBM Corp in sharpening products to address needs of specific vertical sectors.
Atherton claimed the five packages provide an integrated, technology-driven stack allowing customers to install systems faster than if they’d used competing software from IBM. They [IBM] are taking a services centric stand point, we are taking a technology approach with the products we know have a substantial market lead. Atherton said.
Technologies featured in the five offerings include portlets, reference architectures and adaptors from BEA and partners. The Customer Service Solution Framework includes pre-integrated content management from Interwoven and Documentum, Business Intelligence (BI) from Business Objects and Hyperion, voice XML enablement of portals from SandCherry and software from MobileAware to make portal-based applications and services available on wireless devices.
Commenting on BEA’s strategy, US health Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) specialist Adaptis supported the concept of buying an integrated technology stack from a single supplier. Adaptis is switching from Oracle Forms to WebLogic 8.1, providing health policy administration to a client with 200,000 customers.
While Adaptis sees no need to immediately adopt the solution frameworks, systems architect Linden Anderson said: BEA is going to help us, we are going to use them for the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), workflow and portal. We think it will be less expensive for training, development and deployment [if systems] come from a single vendor.
