By William Fellows
BEA Systems Inc will live or die by the success of its WebLogic web application server (formerly known as Tengah) which is why the middleware company will make such a big noise about competitive advantages of version 4.0 which it begins selling today. WebLogic now accounts for around 25% of BEA’s license revenue. The 4.0 software has been out at 200 beta sites for some time and is being melded with BEA’s Tuxedo-based M3 object transaction services as WebLogic Enterprise for the high-end. Development and sales of WebLogic are said to be around two quarters ahead of the company’s initial plan.
BEA claims WebLogic Server 4.0 offers a range of features, including clustering, that puts it streets ahead of rivals such as Sun Microsystems Inc’s NetDynamics, IBM WebSphere, Oracle, Sybase and others. Sun willingly admits that it has some way to go to catch up with WebLogic: it is currently adding Java 2 and full EJB Enterprise Java Beans support to NetDynamics.
In addition to Corba support and connectivity with Microsoft COM- based systems – it’s not supporting COM on its Unix server offerings – BEA claims WebLogic 4.0 can be layered with web-page clustering which provides replication, load-balancing and failover for the logic that generates responses to web clients. For instance if one server goes down you won’t lose the contents in a web shopping cart as the logic is replicated on another. Component clustering provides the same services for EJB. BEA says 4.0 can deliver 2,627 page views per second or 227 million in a day. It claims to have achieved this running 4.0 on a four-way Windows NT server costing less than $50,000 and supporting 10,000 concurrent users. It supports a range of development tools and databases and can be integrated with WebLogic Enterprise when that is delivered.
BEA says the rise of EJB is quickly de-positioning vendors with proprietary application server models such as Forte Software and says the likes of Silverstream and Bluestone are going to find the going increasingly tough in a market where there are 60 or more vendors competing for business. Important areas of development for web application servers will be support for transactions in Java and EAI enterprise application integration. How portals leverage web application servers for value-added e- commerce services will be critical to the way that market develops, it believes. A gray area is how personalization, or portals in a box, will develop. It doesn’t understand why a company such a web marketing software ISV Broadvision continues to devote as much as three quarters of its engineering resources to building and maintaining its own web application server when that’s not its business. It could have bought WebLogic, BEA suggests. WebLogic Server 4.0 costs $10,000 per CPU. Clustering is a $5,000 add-on item.
