BEA Announces AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5;
Service-Enabling Data for Easier Access
BEA Enters OEM Agreement with StrikeIron to enable Front
Office to Back Office Integration, Bring Live Data to Business Users via
Microsoft Excel
Core News Facts:
- BEA announces strategic OEM partnership with StrikeIron,
Inc. to bring data to the front end for business analysts.
- BEA releases AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5;
available today visit bea.com/aqualogic for more information.
- ALDSP 2.5 is designed to offer fast-path integration
between data services and an enterprise service bus (with ALSB and ALDSP).
- ALDSP 2.5 is now natively bilingual, fluent in both XQuery
and SQL.
BEAWORLD 2006 – San Francisco – Sept. 19, 2006 – BEA Systems, Inc., a world
leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the release of
AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) 2.5, which provides a virtual, unified
view of data regardless of its type or location within the enterprise. BEA also
announced a strategic OEM relationship with StrikeIron, Inc., the provider of
the largest marketplace of externally available plug-and-play Web services. The
company is collaborating with StrikeIron to incorporate their OnDemand Web
Services for Microsoft Excel product into the latest version of ALDSP, in order
to facilitate the integration of backend data with the front office user.
“Up to 70 percent of application development time can be spent accessing
disparate data. As a result, data should be one of the first things to be
service-enabled using a Service-Oriented Architecture approach. As companies
decouple or abstract their data from applications and the data source in SOAs,
they need to be able to ensure compliance and control over the data more than
ever before,” said Paul Patrick, vice president and chief architect for
AquaLogic, BEA Systems, Inc. “ALDSP 2.5 service-enables and aggregates data that
traditionally has been locked in disparate silos across the enterprise. It’s the
live data engine powering the service-driven enterprise.”
ALDSP is a key product within the AquaLogic product family, which is part of
the BEA SOA 360° platform. Announced today at BEAWorld 2006, the BEA SOA 360°
platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and
spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic, Tuxedo and the
company’s newest product initiative, BEA Workspace 360°. (See Sept. 19, 2006,
press release titled, “BEA Announces SOA 360° Industry’s Most Unified SOA
Platform to Transform and Optimize Business.”)
Data delivery through SOA offers today’s best and most reliable solution to
many of the typical obstacles, such as diverse data source types, decentralized
information repositories and various technology limitations. ALDSP represents a
new paradigm for data access and management in the enterprise, through delivery
of information as a service to people, processes and applications. BEA ALDSP 2.5
offers fast-path integration with other critical service infrastructure platform
products, such AquaLogic Service Bus, helping to enable companies to fully
realize the benefits of a full SOA implementation. In addition, this latest
version is designed to deliver greater flexibility to support Web services and
reporting tools with a bilingual engine to both XQuery and, now, SQL.
“Traditional data integration methods are costly in terms of time and
resources and typically results in data that becomes quickly outdated,” said Bob
Brauer, chief executive officer and president, StrikeIron. “The ALDSP Excel
capability helps put a face on the BEA SOA solution, empowering business users
to access real-time data across the enterprise in an environment that they are
already familiar with and without any programming. This also frees up IT
resources and support requirements so they can be re-allocated to business
critical efforts. Solutions like these can have a tremendous effect on the
bottom line.”
Latest Release Delivers Data Access and Productivity
New features
in BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5 include:
- Native Integration with AquaLogic Service Bus
(ALSB). A complete SOA implementation requires both an enterprise service
bus and a data services layer working seamlessly in concert. The release
offers a custom transport path where data services within ALDSP can be
directly accessed by the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus product, providing better
performance, security and full array of data and services management
capabilities.
- Native SQL Support. Adding a native SQL interface to
ALDSP maximizes an organization’s return on investment for implementing a data
services layer since more clients such as business intelligence reporting
tools can consume data services and benefit from better performance, data
reuse and consistency. ALDSP is now optimized for both SQL and XQuery, acting
as a bilingual engine, enabling it to not only cover a broader set of business
intelligence use cases but also deliver real-time views of business data to
reporting tools from relational and non-relational sources such as packaged
applications or Web services.
- ALDSP Microsoft Excel Support. BEA is now able to
bring live data to business users via Web Services within Microsoft Excel from
multiple, diverse data sources. This new feature connects the front office to
the heterogeneous back office – empowering business users by providing simple
drag and drop data service directly into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This
offloads the high cost and time associated with data integration efforts
required by IT and instead gives business users greater office productivity at
their fingertips.
AvailabilityALDSP 2.5 is available today. For more
information, visit bea.com/aqualogic or see the product in action at BEAWorld.
Register today at bea.com/beaworld.
About BEAWorldBEAWorld is the premier event for SOA thought leadership
and is taking place in three strategic world markets spanning the Americas,
Europe and Asia. The conference is designed to provide critical insights, hands
on instruction, best practice strategies and opportunities for interaction with
like-minded professionals, industry leaders, visionaries and expert
practitioners. In addition to working to help make SOA a successful reality,
BEAWorld is the place to find the latest information on BEA’s infrastructure
technologies including BEA Tuxedo®, BEA WebLogic, BEA AquaLogic, and BEA SOA
360o. This year’s show will also include a Partner Showcase, highlighting the
latest and most innovative developments from the extensive BEA partner
community. The first of three planned worldwide events is scheduled to begin
today, Sept. 19 at the Moscone Convention Center North in San Francisco. Two
additional events are scheduled in the following cities: Prague (Oct. 11-12) and
Beijing (Dec. 13-14). Visit bea.com/beaworld to register today. For sponsorship
information, please visit bea.com/beaworld/sponsors/.
About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise
infrastructure software. BEA delivers the unified SOA platform for business
transformation and optimization in order to improve cost structures and grow new
revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to achieve
Business LiquidITy™ can be found at www.bea.com.
www.bea.com
About StrikeIron
StrikeIron is the leader in providing innovative solutions for delivering data
over the emerging Internet. The company’s innovative Web Services Marketplace
provides a technology platform, micro-transaction management and a consistent
interface across many XML-based Web services from multiple, diverse sources.
This allows business users, application developers and enterprise IT
professionals to customize and integrate external data sources and additional
external functionality into enterprise, Web, and composite applications.
Currently, StrikeIron provides over 100 live data sources and business
functions from organizations such as Cortera, D&B, Gale, MapQuest, Midnight Trader,
Tax Data Systems, The Sports Network, and Zacks.
StrikeIron also offers IronCloud™, the only comprehensive Web services delivery
platform that opens up new channels for data distribution and consumption
through Web Services. Enterprises of all sizes can now reduce the cost and
complexity of managing the challenges of data distribution which include
leveraging an existing external hardware and software architecture, controlling
and metering access and usage, external monitoring for 24x7 reliability, full
usage analytics, as well as multiple authentication scenarios and instead
concentrate their focus on making information easier for partners, customers,
and distributed business units to access and use. StrikeIron delivers value to
over 1,500 customers and partners such as Avaya, BEA, Delivery.com, IBM, Honda
Europe, D&B, Siemens, Nike, Swarovski, ShoeBuy, and Exclusive Resorts. For
more information, visit www.strikeiron.com.
###
Jim Rivas
BEA
(408) 570-8834
jrivas@bea.com
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