BEA WebLogic Server 6.1 Is Four Times As Fast and Significantly More Powerful Than IBM WebSphere 4.0 for E-Business Applications

BEA WebLogic Server Outperforms IBM and Oracle on Their Own Performance Benchmarks

SAN JOSE, Calif. — July 9, 2001 — BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS), one of the world’s leading e-business infrastructure software companies, today announced performance benchmark results demonstrating that BEA WebLogic Server 6.1 is up to four times as fast as IBM WebSphere Application Server 4.0. These results were achieved using IBM’s own WebSphere Performance Benchmark Sample application, which models an online brokerage firm providing Web-based financial services. Furthermore, BEA WebLogic Server executes up to 14 times as many transactions per second on a key individual Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) performance test in the IBM (NYSE: IBM) benchmark application.

Industry performance leadership is built on a combination of unparalleled performance and the essential infrastructure required for scalable, always available e-business. BEA WebLogic Server 6.1 extends BEA’s technology leadership with essential enterprise functionality not available in many other application servers. For example, when compared against the Oracle 9iAS application server, BEA has demonstrated that WebLogic Server is 54 percent faster than Oracle 9iAS when measuring transactions per second with the industry standard Pet Store application that Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) used in its recent benchmarking program. Moreover, BEA WebLogic Server provides a host of essential enterprise features not available in Oracle’s new application server, including two-phase commit transactions, transaction logging, and EJB clustering. Clustering provides an essential infrastructure for reliable, scalable e-business, and EJB provides the business logic and transaction management for these applications. While Oracle has yet to introduce EJB clustering in its new application server, BEA has been providing EJB clustering for large scale, business critical applications for nearly two years.

"Once again, we prove that BEA WebLogic Server is the industry leader in performance, even when using our competition’s own benchmarks," said Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer of the BEA E-Commerce Server Division. "We continue to encourage customers to benchmark application servers using applications and workloads that model their own business requirements, and to our knowledge, BEA always comes out as the performance leader in these customer benchmarks."

Beyond benchmarks, the ultimate test of performance and scalability are proven large-scale customer deployments. 10,000 companies, including the majority of Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 companies are already relying on BEA for their most demanding applications and are depending on BEA WebLogic performance and scalability as the foundation of their enterprise e-business architecture. The performance leadership of the #1 Java application server helps future-proof enterprises around the world by enabling them to scale seamlessly as their business grows, while reducing overall hardware costs and providing a better customer experience.

Further details about these benchmark tests can be found at http://www.bea.com/products/weblogic/server/performance_ibm.shtml and http://www.bea.com/products/weblogic/server/performance_oracle.shtml.