BEA Systems Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. each advanced their Java application servers Monday.
BEA offered customers a path to utility computing through a partnership with Veritas Software Corp.,
while Sun released a low-end version of its application server that supports the latest enterprise
Java standard.
BEA inked a deal to make its WebLogic application server work better with three Veritas products:
Veritas OpForce, for automatically provisioning servers; Veritas Indepth, for managing the
performance of applications; and Veritas Cluster Server, for linking servers in a group.
"Our products have always supported BEA, but it's been done in a way that you'd find support for a
lot of other applications," said Arya Barirani, director of solutions marketing at Veritas. "Now the organizations are working together more tightly on the engineering front, so that support will be deeper
and a lot more customized."
The joint offering provides customers with a path to utility computing, the companies said. The
utility model can help reduce IT costs by letting customers run applications on a group of relatively
low-cost servers and then shift the workload among those servers automatically as demand for
applications rises and falls.
Veritas and BEA position themselves as neutral vendors whose products work with a range of hardware
and software. Their joint offering is probably more open than most, meaning it should work better
in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of servers, operating systems and applications,
said William Hurley, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass.
In contrast, utility software from companies such as IBM and Oracle Corp. tends to work better with
their own products.
Sun advance their Java app servers