SAN FRANCISCO — JavaOne Developer Conference — BEA Systems, Inc. increased its lead over other e-business infrastructure providers, becoming the first company to introduce an e-business platform that combines application server, Web Services, integration and portal technologies into a powerful single, integrated, standards-based e-infrastructure solution.

The expanded BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform™ will include BEA WebLogic Server™ 6.1, the Web Services release of the world謘 #1 Java application server; BEA WebLogic Integration,™ a completely J2EE-based integration solution; and BEA WebLogic Portal 4.0, BEA謘 next-generation enterprise portal product. With these new releases combined into one complete and integrated platform, BEA will make it easier than ever for customers to connect business processes, link enterprise and e-commerce applications and share information across the enterprise and the Internet. In effect, making it much easier for companies to do e-business.

"We have expanded our e-business platform in response to strong demand from the market," said Alfred Chuang, founder, president and COO of BEA Systems. "Today謘 businesses face many obstacles within their enterprise systems that prevent them from realizing the promise of e-business. Their most acute need is for applications to talk to each other, both within the enterprise and across the firewall to partners and suppliers. BEA謘 answer is to develop the first non-proprietary, integrated solution to allow data and services to be shared across multiple applications and systems. Unlike other offerings in the market, we are delivering a truly integrated platform that is built on open standards and the market謘 #1 application server — the de facto standard for the industry謘 leading systems integrators, independent software vendors and application service providers. By expanding our platform, we are making it easier for companies to create an open standards-based global community of seamlessly interconnected data, business processes and people."

The expanded BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform is designed to support the entire spectrum of Web Services — from simple to multi-party Business Web Services — enabling business-to-business collaboration, and services and application integration with partners, suppliers and internal and external customers on one common platform. BEA is expanding the power and reach of the application server and evolving Java, integration and Web Services technologies to enable businesses to unlock the potential of the Internet as a universal field of business, rather than a Web of loosely linked sites.

"Convergence of the application server and the integration broker technologies into the next-generation e-business software platform empowers the user to design and deploy more flexible and more powerful applications, integrating the distributed heterogeneous resources of a virtual enterprise into new and agile composite business processes," said Yefim Natis, vice president and research director at Gartner, Inc.