Founded in 1995, BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure and middleware software. While BEA is best known for its BEA WebLogic® J2EE platform, its BPM strategy is actually based on the newer AquaLogic family of products. BEA AquaLogic® BPM (ALBPM), based on the acquisition of BPM pureplay Fuego in 2006, is part of the company’s Business Interaction Division, which also includes BEA’s Social Computing products (AquaLogic Ensemble, AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Pathways) together with AquaLogic Interaction, a family of portal and collaboration software based on the earlier acquisition of Plumtree Software. In 2006, BEA claims 100% quarter-to-quarter growth in BPM revenue, and BPM is now the fastest-growing segment of the company’s product portfolio. Today, ALBPM is evolving toward tighter integration with the BEA stack of complementary technologies, including portal and collaboration tools, SOA infrastructure, and J2EE middleware, to address the needs of increasingly “enterprise”-oriented customers.
AquaLogic BPM is positioned as an enabler of rapid BPM solution development and deployment, ideally in 60 days or less. It also aims to differentiate itself by lowering the entry cost barrier, with a freely downloadable full-featured evaluation version of the design environment and runtime server that works on a single machine. BEA offers an enterprise-class version of the platform on a variety of application servers, and provides advanced transaction management capabilities missing in far more expensive BPMS offerings.
