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BEA debuts Enterprise 2.0 AquaLogic product family

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) today BEA will show off the latest versions of its new set of products that sprinkle Web 2.0 and social computing pixie dust (also known as Enterprise 2.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) today BEA will show off the latest versions of its new set of products that sprinkle Web 2.0 and social computing pixie dust (also known as Enterprise 2.0) on enterprise software. I wrote about the products last year, when they were less fully featured and mere code names, here. The products, with their official names, include:

AquaLogic Ensemble (formerly Project Runner), for creating and managing enterprise mashup applications, regardless of development platform and hosting environment. It provides the security, provisioning, activity tracking for building widgets and mashups.

AquaLogic Pages (formerly Project Builder), designed for surfacing enterprise data and creating basic Web applications. Capabilities include creating pages from drag-and-drop components; pulling data into components from enterprise systems, RSS and Web services; and wiring components together to create dynamic Web applications. 

 
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BEA AquaLogic Pages can wire components to a Google map component to display for location data

AquaLogic Pathways (formerly Project Graffiti), combining social bookmarking and tagging with search and analytics to assist users in discovering and sharing information and expertise. Pathways comes with a set of connectors for sourcing enterprise content, such as from Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, file systems, Web servers and Documentum, and provides auto-tagging; asynchronous scheduling; security and taxonomy mirroring; and text and metadata extraction, as well as metadata normalization. Users can also tag items and people in the system, create tag clouds  and search the content.

Pathways introduces ActivityRank, a ranking system based on a series of factors derived from implicit and explicit user actions. For example, ActivityRank tracks how often an item is edited and tagged and the rank of its editors and taggers. 

 
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BEA AquaLogic Pathways provides a tag cloud and ability to search for items (documents) or people (expert identification) 

BEA provides some basic information and demos on a Web site, cutely named en.terpri.se, but pricing and other details won't be available until Q2, when the products are expected to be available beyond a few select beta testers.  

BEA is not the first to offer products with these kinds of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Competitors such as Oracle, IBM and SAP have products with some of the features. Startups such as System One, Connectbeam, Cogenz, Teqlo and a host of others offer some of the elements, but BEA seems to have done a good job of developing a suite of products that brings portals, mashups, Web apps, ease of development and social networking into an enterprise context. 

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