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Blue Titan and BEA join XQuery forces

• By Rich Seeley
• April 30, 2003

Blue Titan Software Inc., San Francisco, and BEA Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., this week disclosed a joint product marketing effort that officials at the two firms said calls for the vendors to combine XQuery technology with service-level controls.

In the joint sales and marketing effort, users employing BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic in applications pulling information from multiple data sources will be offered Blue Titan Network Director to provide a management infrastructure, said Blue Titan officials.

Sam Boonin, vice president of marketing at Blue Titan, described BEA's Liquid Data as "a data integration product that takes advantage of XQuery to enable you to do relatively easily distributed XML queries and to build reusable queries enabling you to query multiple systems. The challenge is that the kind of flexibility that Liquid Data provides, amplifies the need for control."

What Blue Titan brings to the table is Network Director's capabilities to enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs), provide access controls for enterprise systems and to monitor performance across multiple disparate systems, Boonin said.

"What we've done in bringing together BEA Liquid Data and the Blue Titan Network Director is to provide the flexibility of data integration with the controls," Boonin said. "So, for example, you can assign and enforce Service Level Agreements for access to different systems. If you think about a complex query where you have a portal that tracks sales information from five or six different systems in realtime or near realtime, you're using XML to tap into a variety of distributed systems, so it has a lot of the same performance, reliability and security concerns as you have with Web services interoperability."

The joint agreement between Blue Titan and BEA came about as customers of both companies began to see the challenges of applications built on a Service-Oriented Architecture, Boonin said.

"What we're starting to see is customers who are essentially building a variety of service-based applications around their company," he said. "That increases XML and Web services traffic across their networks and they want a common way of handling it all. What they're looking for is a common, shared infrastructure."

For more information, please go to www.bluetitan.com, www.bea.com, or click here for more articles about BEA from the Company Watch section of our site.