BEA Systems ups middleware effort
BEA Systems tomorrow will debut a long-awaited product intended to give it a boost in the fast-growing middleware technology market.
The company will debut M3, a product developed under the code name Iceberg, that combines its Tuxedo middleware with MessageQ, a message queuing product, and object request broker technology it purchased from Digital Equipment last year.
M3 will allow large companies to roll out new distributed applications, linked to the Web and to older transactional business systems they rely on.
BEA said several companies, including telecommunications giant Ameritech and packaged application software vendor Mincom Pty. Limited, will take part in a New York City-based rollout of M3 tomorrow. Both companies are using M3 for internal projects.
Transaction processing middleware has for years been used to manage data traffic on large mainframe and Unix-based systems. The software is designed to make sure business transactions--credit card orders, airline reservations, money transfers--don't get lost.
The software is becoming more important as companies begin to link back-end business applications to new Web-based e-commerce systems.
The strategy of combining three types of increasingly popular middleware will appeal to technology buyers currently evaluating the highly complex systems, and could help BEA in its bid to become a middleware kingpin.
"Customers are confused over which product to buy," said Karen Boucher, a vice president with the Standish Group. "This gives them one package to use in different environments. And, this gives them a way to support object systems. These prods are intended to combine the reuse goodness of the object world with the robustness of TP monitors," she said.
One major hurdle for BEA is that M3 joins a list of similar products from more well-heeled competitors. IBM, for example, already ships a product called Component Broker that combines similar functions.
Microsoft is also making a play for a piece of the middleware market with a set of technologies based on its COM (component object model) technology.
The next iteration of COM, called COM+, will combine Microsoft's Transaction Server, Message Queue Server, and other middleware.
BEA's M3 will be priced at $395 per concurrent user.