News

BEA sees gold in 'Application Infrastructure'

• By Rich Seeley
• April 24, 2002

An enterprise software category BEA calls "Application Infrastructure" will be a $57 billion market by 2005, Rani Merritt, senior vice president at BEA Systems Inc. told attendees at this month's UCLA Business Technology Conference on Perspectives, Problems and Profitability.

She positioned BEA WebLogic as the potential leader in that "application infrastructure" where she acknowledge the prime competition will come from IBM's WebSphere, with Microsoft coming in third based on .NET and its front-office dominance.

Explaining the application infrastructure model for WebLogic to her UCLA audience, Merritt said, "What we have put together at BEA is a new category of software that runs on a single architecture that enables CIOs to build, integrate, extend and manage applications in a heterogeneous environment."

In BEA's definition, the application infrastructure product includes the J2EE application server, development tools, application management tools, a presentation layer and security. In this model, the traditional enterprise integration role has been largely taken over by Web services, Merritt noted.

She said BEA is predicting that the market for application infrastructure software will reach $57 billion in 2005; in addition, application infrastructure software is being recognized by IDC as one of the fastest growing IT markets.

For more information, go to http://www.bea.com.