BEA Systems - the eCommerce transaction company.

BEA was a leader in defining the middleware market with its transaction processing and Java platforms. Increasingly, that technology is being employed to build commerce engines for web sites. Now the company wants to define itself as the eCommerce transactions company. BEA plans to spend more than $20 million to raise its redefined profile. Its efforts are described in terms of meeting the expectations of the E-generation. That is defined as the ever-growing sector of the global population that is connected to the Internet, and interested in buying goods and services electronically. Scalable and highly available Internet commerce engines are increasingly reliant on the maturing of object and component architectures. Despite some wild comments to the contrary, object technology is steadily advancing and increasingly widely deployed. Components are rapidly becoming the preferred approach to software packaging, with components and objects different sides of the same coin. The Object Management Group (OMG) defined the enduring standards for distributed objects in the CORBA architecture. Java and its JavaBean component models have complemented the CORBA work. These trends have reached maturity with the J2EE Java Enterprise Architecture. This includes support for Enterprise JavaBeans, and provides an off the shelf software architecture that accelerates implementations far more quickly than reinvention from scratch. Along with J2EE go application servers that provide the environment to deploy custom built business logic. It is in the area of application servers that BEA has grown strong. While there are more than a score of vendors offering servers, and demonstrating adherence to standards, two companies have stood out. BEA and IBM have very similar technology through their matching product suites - Weblogic and Websphere respectively. Apart from eCommerce, drivers such as mergers and acquisitions or the move to customer relationship marketing are putting pressure on the integration of IT systems. Capable application servers are central to the successful management of these moves.