BEA Demonstrates Industry's First Hot-Swappable Application Server and Announces New Customers and Acquisition at BEAWorld 2005 Kickoff

04 October 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif.—October 3, 2005—BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS), a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, demonstrated at BEAWorld 2005 a version of BEA WebLogic Server® that incorporates the industry’s first hot-swappable application technology. Conference attendees saw the first-ever demonstration of this new capability that can help IT managers to perform routine maintenance upgrades with zero downtime.

Currently, IT managers typically perform maintenance during the slowest part of the week. However, in today’s Internet age, most businesses cannot afford any downtime as businesses are now finding themselves responding to customer service requests 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Bill Roth, vice president of solutions and product marketing, BEA Systems Inc., demonstrated the new hot-swappable application server with an application that simulated multiple users making real-time stock transactions. While transactions continued to take place, Roth uploaded and deployed a new version of software with a single mouse-click. The entire process was seamless and transparent to users without affecting any real-time transactions.

"Imagine changing the engine of a race car during the race," Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive officer, BEA Systems, Inc., told approximately 2,000 delegates at the company’s users’ conference on infrastructure software and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in Santa Clara, Calif. "We’ve got the first hot-swappable application server. With this technology, IT managers experience zero downtime. Features like this, plus our software’s speed, stability and compliance with J2EE and open source applications can help makes enterprise computing fluid and simple."

As part of his keynote, Mr. Chuang emphasized that BEA is the only software company dedicated to the power of "and." IT is no longer a world where customers have to choose one vendor over another. Instead, BEA is committed to delivering solutions that are open source, interoperable and platform agnostic. This type of "liquid thinking" goes back to the fundamental ideas on which BEA was founded more than a decade ago: to lead the industry by making enterprise computing fluid and simple. Chuang emphasized that the main theme of BEAWorld 2005 was Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the unique business value BEA can deliver its customers with a software suite that is easy-to-use, offers a lower total cost of ownership and gives customers a proven competitive advantage.

BEA Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges jumpstarted the second day of BEAWorld with a keynote address highlighting three key areas where BEA can help companies simplify their infrastructure and become more agile. The first area is the need for Service Infrastructure, which is required to manage, monitor and compose services in a SOA. Carges described how the AquaLogic™ product family enables composite applications and services to be composed from .Net or J2EE services without necessarily involving development, providing the infrastructure to deploy, manage, and operate a full SOA.

The second area is about simplification of Enterprise Java and mixing and matching the best of both worlds—open source and commercial products—using BEA’s blended development and deployment approach. After highlighting the benefits of leveraging open source innovation, Carges described how WebLogic Server provides administrative tooling and capabilities for the Spring open source framework and Apache Tomcat that goes even beyond the native tools available. He announced the acquisition of M7, makers of NitroX, an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). NitroX, available now from http://m7.com, supports sophisticated development of web applications based on industry standard and open source frameworks, including Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and JavaServer Pages. BEA plans to merge its existing BEA WebLogic Workshop™ developer tools capabilities with the M7 toolset to create the BEA Workshop for Java IDE. With the acquisition of M7, BEA is taking bold, new steps to deliver to developers a more complete and easy-to-use development environment on the Eclipse platform supporting the blended development and deployment model.

The third area is all about the advances in the BEA JRockit® Java Virtual Machine (JVM) taking Java in new demanding areas where utilizing Java had not been an option. Carges pointed out that BEA JRockit is at the cutting edge of JVM innovation, delivering industry-leading performance and reliability. In addition, BEA JRockit is now the only JVM with deterministic garbage collection and therefore the ability to guarantee unprecedented latencies.

During the three-day event in Santa Clara, BEA showcased several demonstrations targeted at executives, architects, IT professionals and developers. BEA demonstrated to executives how BEA technology enables improved customer experience for their customers and makes business processes more fluid by for example enabling a customer facing application with Voice over IP (VoIP). IT professionals were introduced to new ways of aligning business and IT, to break down stove pipes of information and make the business more agile. Architects were shown how to build an implementable roadmap for successful SOA deployment that delivers business value and is relying on BEA products built from the ground up for SOA. And BEA demonstrated to developers how they can get their projects done writing less code and following best practices while leveraging all the best of open source and BEA technology for rock solid results.

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