BEA, suppliers of the popular Weblogic servers and software have annonced their intention to open up parts of their weblogic workshop software. It has been claimed that IBM's WebSphere has been easing Weblogic aside. (My place of work is a Weblogic shop & are very happy with it).

Doug M


[link|http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=44892|http://www.sys-con.c...ry/?storyid=44892]

FULL EXTRACT >>>>
BEA is expected to announce today that they will open major parts of WebLogic Workshop and donate it to the open source community in an attempt to stop losing market share against for example JBoss which is a free alternative to BEA's more expensive WebLogic licensing and support programs.
With its code name "Beehive," BEA's global goal is to make the WebLogic Development Framework the world's leading toolset for developing applications - against competitors IBM, JBoss, and Oracle.

Alfred Chaung's view on this was expressed in a recent interview as follows: "I think the opportunity and also the challenge at hand is how do we continue to proliferate Workshop in an exponential way."

Typically the open source projects that have been deployed in the SME space have been tactical rather than strategic projects, but this announcement is aimed at changing that by making parts of WebLogic Workshop available to OS developers so that they can build scalable, secure apps on the so-called "OS Java" platform - i.e., strategic projects for major companies, not just in-house experiments for SMEs.

BEA considers today's announcement big news. The details of BEA's news will show if they are actually trailing IBM which introduced earlier this month new versions of its WebSphere Studio Application Developer and WebSphere Studio Site Developer that feature ease-of-use capabilities. Sun Microsystems's "Project Rave," already announced as Java Studio Creator, is also expected to be out later this year.

BEA Systems' stock price dropped 23 percent on Friday, its biggest plunge in more than five years, after the company missed its license sales target in the U.S.

BEA's newest product on the market, WebLogic 8.1, did not benefit from an overall improvement in information technology spending, which was a big disappointment for the analysts - who also have concerns about the company's somewhat unstable organizational structure. Many analysts downgraded the stock on Friday and reduced the company's sales and profit forecasts for the remaining of the fiscal year. For Wall Street, execution and competition is proving to be a larger problem for BEA than anticipated.

When JDJ reported last Thursday that IBM has widened its lead over BEA, the news story created a large amount of feedback. It will be interesting to watch BEA's announcement today, which is moved to an earlier date after intense pressure from Wall Street on Friday in an urgent attempt to control damage. BEA's news was originally planned for next week at their eWorld conference.
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