BEA & EDS throw weight behind Java

BEA and EDS have an agreed an alliance to jointly market services and software on BEA's Web Logic ebusiness platform, based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard.

The move formalises a long-running partnership that has seen EDS deliver over 100 successful applications based on BEA's technology.

WebLogic, like IBM's WebSphere, allows the combination of commerce, portal, integration and web services. Research from Meta gives it a 37 per cent market share in deployed J2EE application servers, compared to IBM's 22 per cent.

Mark Pritchard, senior architect at BEA, claimed that standards left proprietary approaches looking dated. "The model of linking proprietary applications together has proven flawed. It provides incomplete answers to the problems facing enterprises, which then find it impossible to maintain up to date applications," he said.

Some analysts say that demand for J2EE-based products shows that corporates are sceptical of the ability of any vendor to provide wall to wall functionality, and want to see products based on standards.

Will Cappelli, director at Giga, said: "There has been a sea change in the last 12 months in the way corporates regard application integration technologies. The industry needs a standards approach.

"J2EE is the best on offer and is becoming an increasingly accepted solution. The only alternative is Microsoft's .Net, which lies on the periphery of corporate infrastructure and its ability to embed deeper into the corporate infrastructure is in danger of stalling."

However, other analysts, such as Meta's Michael Barnes, believe that J2EE may struggle to be linked closer to web services as users will want to leverage existing C++ and Cobol skills, among other factors.

J2EE backers argue that corporates will increasingly hire IT services firms, such as EDS, to integrate applications.

"IT services providers are becoming the primary channel for delivering functionality to large corporates," said Capelli.

Alan Banks, UK country manager at BEA, commented: "Corporates such as BT and Royal Sun Alliance are buying into Web Logic. They are betting their future application integration budgets on our technology, and it is working."