BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 takes e-commerce global with unmatched web-to-mainframe integration

BEA Systems, Inc.,has strengthened its position as a world leader in mission-critical Web and transaction application server solutions with the release of BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2. BEA WebLogic Enterprise provides companies with a reliable way to develop global e-commerce applications that can be distributed across hundreds, or even thousands, of local or geographically dispersed computers. Moreover, BEA WebLogic Enterprise gives developers the option of building applications using a variety of programming paradigms and languages,including Java, C++ and C,and deploying them via a server that can scale to reliably support millions of online e-commerce customers. To date, more than 100 companies have turned to the BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 e-commerce transaction server to help transform themselves into e-businesses.

@pos.com has done exactly that, using BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 to build, in three months, a Web-enabled point-of-sale application that is designed to quickly ramp up to millions of transactions a day. @pos.com was one of nearly 100 customers in the BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 early access program, which kicked off in December 1998. Other customers include Alltel Information Services, Amazon.com, Chase Manhattan, Federal Express, France Telecom, and Swedish Rail - a list which demonstrates the wide range of industries, businesses and applications that BEA WebLogic Enterprise is currently supporting.

"We looked at various application servers, and chose BEA WebLogic Enterprise because of its robustness, multi-platform portability, and scalability," said Michael Besack, director of @pos.com`s Transaction Processing Center. "We felt that BEA WebLogic Enterprise, with the BEA TUXEDO engine behind it, was the sturdiest transaction system we tested outside of the mainframe world. The CORBA and Java portability were important to us, because with cluster-based processing you end up with a mixture of platforms. And scalability, given the distributed architecture, was critical. We need to be able to quickly scale to the hundreds of terabytes of data on a highly distributed architecture, performing millions of transactions a day. We felt that BEA WebLogic Enterprise is designed to give us the long-term scalability we need to do this and more."

"The benefit of using BEA WebLogic Enterprise is that now we can add new sales and distribution channels faster and more easily," said Oscar Nystr"omer, project manager at Swedish State Railways, noting that they currently have around 10 distribution channels. "We no longer have to slowly and painstakingly distribute changes throughout each individual system as before, which impeded time-to-market. Now, any time we dream up a new way of selling tickets, new business rules, new passenger types, we need to change the system only in one central place, so all distributed clients and types will receive the new business logic automatically. BEA WebLogic Enterprise is designed to help us significantly improve our time-to-market."

Why Customers Choose BEA WebLogic Enterprise

These customers chose BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 as their application server platform because it delivers advanced scalability, reliability, and expandability in a standards-based product. BEA WebLogic Enterprise, in a single package, offers customers wide flexibility in development models and programming languages, including CORBA, Java, C++, C, Cobol and, later this year, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). Customers can mix and match CORBA objects, BEA TUXEDO services, and soon, EJB components in the same application. In addition, BEA WebLogic Enterprise provides a platform for end-to-end Web-to-mainframe integration, helping to allow businesses to offer a more competitive set of products and services by harnessing their IT infrastructure in e-business initiatives, not just a standalone Web-site.

"We believe many customers, like Amazon.com and E Trade, see BEA as important to enabling them to take full advantage of the Internet economy," said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of BEA. "BEA products help meet the demands of e-commerce with a transaction platform that has been tested in the most severe circumstances. BEA WebLogic Enterprise provides the security, scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance to help ensure that the multi-tier Web-based applications of global businesses do not `hit the wall` during peak loads. Customers choose us when their systems simply have to work because their business is riding on it every second of the day," Coleman said.

"BEA continues to be a leader in this space," said Karen Boucher, executive vice president of The Standish Group International, Inc., a market research and advisory firm specializing in mission-critical software and electronic commerce, and author of Essential Guide to Object Monitors. "BEA WebLogic Enterprise is built on a proven, industrial-strength engine that has survived the tests of time. This product provides the necessary features to enable companies to ensure rapid delivery of bullet-proof e-commerce solutions."

Reliability, Scalability, Performance

The Keys to the E-Commerce Kingdom With recent rapid growth of the Internet economy - a recently released study reports that the U.S. Internet economy generated $301 billion in revenue and employed 1.2 million Americans in 1998* - BEA believes many companies, large and small, have accelerated their e-business plans.

"On-line customers expect extremely high levels of service, reliability, and value," said Coleman. "They demand personalized treatment, services that are easy to access, and transactions that are performed quickly and reliably. In their minds, reliability not only stands for the integrity and security of the transaction, but also uptime and responsiveness. E-businesses strive to ensure this reliability and build in that sense of trust no matter how large their systems grow, no matter how many millions of customers they serve each day, or how many thousands of transactions they process each second."

The expected levels of service, availability, and value are achieved by bullet-proofing the transactional application between the customer and the back-end system that fulfills the customer`s requests. For example, a customer at an auto insurance Web site generates several computer transactions when asking for a quote: the customer `pings` the database server for the latest rates, which compares a table with allowed coverage plans based on the customer`s driving record, which then pings another system to get the data on the state, county, and city where the car being insured resides, and so on. The initial request generates a highly complex transaction chain that spans several systems, and must be managed seamlessly and invisibly to the customer*only the service should be apparent. Providing an environment that supports this type of transaction over the Web requires the kind of reliable and scalable systems that companies are building with BEA WebLogic Enterprise - systems designed to respond quickly, every minute of every day, every time, virtually without fail. When transaction software falls short, customers can and do initiate their own "failover mechanism"; they click over to the competitor.

BEA WebLogic Enterprise`s message and transaction switching infrastructure combined with standards-based CORBA IIOP session concentration and connection pooling help ensure scalability and efficient resource utilization; its two-phase commit capabilities help guarantee completion of transactions across distributed systems or with a back-end mainframe; and its support of Java and C++ for CORBA, J2EE and EJB before year end, as well as traditional languages such as C and COBOL help make it easy for companies to move their development teams to new languages and programming paradigms at their own pace.

The BEA WebLogic Family

BEA WebLogic Enterprise is part of a family of application servers tailored to solve the IT challenges of e-commerce and Web-ready "bet your business" applications. BEA WebLogic Enterprise brings flexibility to component-based application development, deployment, and management, while helping protect IT investments through a strict adherence to industry standards - as opposed to proprietary methodologies that lock customers in to a certain seller. In addition to BEA WebLogic Enterprise, the BEA WebLogic family includes:

BEA WebLogic Server

a leading platform for developing robust, business-critical, scalable Java-based solutions. It is designed for companies that want to develop new multi-tier application business logic with Java 2 Enterprise Edition components. BEA WebLogic Server has won numerous awards, including:

.         Best Web Development Software at 1999 Data News Awards for Excellence, March 1999

.         Crossroads 99 A-List Award, Jan. 1999

.         JavaWorld`s Editors` Choice for Web Application Servers, Dec. 1998

.         Java Developer`s Journal 1998 Editor`s Choice for Application Servers, Dec. 1998

.         1998 RealWare Award for Best Application Using a Component Architecture, Dec. 1998

.         Java Report Writers` Choice for Product that "Significantly Improved Quality," Dec. 1998

BEA WebLogic Express - the BEA WebLogic platform for developing simple HTML front-end applications to a database, for companies who want to develop new business logic in Java but not EJBs or components.

Product Availability

BEA WebLogic Enterprise 4.2 is available now. The product provides integrated CORBA C++ and CORBA Java support, and supports the BEA TUXEDO API. Before the end of the year, BEA plans to release BEA WebLogic Enterprise 5.0, which will add support for J2EE (including EJB).