Busy BEA's new challenges

Just last week, I commented how BEA is really churning out the goods this summer. In June, the vendor announced its AquaLogic tools, and last week began shipping an ESB. Today, BEA announced that it has begin shipping the latest version of its flagship WebLogic Server platform (9.0). The new platform consists of an "enterprise-grade kernel" that supports multiple programming models, and the vendor sees it mainly tasked for building SOAs.

Fellow blogger David Berlind sees a bumpy road ahead for the middleware vendor. In this post, David observes that BEA faces stiff competition from large comemrcial infrastructure vendors, such as IBM, as well as open source platforms such as JBoss. Not only that, BEA has shifted its business model to a "blended" approach that encompasses both open-source tools and commercial offerings, such as Beehive and Spring.