News

Blue Titan, BEA build integration into apps

• By Rich Seeley
• August 12, 2003

IT is moving from integrating systems, which were not originally intended to work together, to software development where integration through Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a given.

That is the view of Frank Martinez, chairman and chief technology officer at Blue Titan Software Inc. (www.bluetitan.com), San Francisco.

"Integration's typically been approached as an afterthought where you haven't had the possibility of developing applications and enterprise software solutions that are 'integrate-able' from the outset," he said.

The trend toward developing with integration at the forefront is addressed by this month's release of WebLogic Platform 8.1 from BEA Systems Inc., Martinez said. With that release, Blue Titan announced that its Network Director Web services networking product is now fully integrated with WebLogic as part of the two companies' close technology partnership.

Network Director 2.0 extends the WebLogic Platform into SOA-based development by providing the required control over distributed enterprise applications, said Martinez. This control addresses what he terms "pain points" that BEA customers are seeking to overcome in their next generation of applications.

"The pain points they're looking to address with the move to a Service-Oriented Architecture typically revolve around being able to deploy different types of business processes than they've been able to develop and deploy previously," he said. "I'm going to characterize that as loosely coupled, horizontal business processes."

For example, he said, a pharmaceutical company using the BEA and Blue Titan products is developing a SOA-based system to automate research for new drugs and processes such as running trials once a drug is developed.

"It's a change in terms of business process from where your data, application logic and process logic all live inside a single application," Martinez explained, "to where you have a series of participating software assets that are part of a horizontal business process that goes across organizational boundaries, business boundaries, geographies and operational boundaries."