BEA Targets E-Commerce

BEA Systems Inc. on Tuesday will launch a new corporate logo, a new Web site, and a $20 million advertising campaign to rebrand itself as an e-commerce transactions company.

Known now as a middleware company, BEA will also build up its indirect channels, striking partnerships with resellers to bring "e-solutions" to small and medium businesses, says CEO Bill Coleman.

A year ago, BEA acquired WebLogic, which makes a family of Java-based application servers. Coleman said that until last year BEA assumed that Microsoft Corp. would own the low and medium ends of the market with its Windows NT/Component Object Model (COM) strategy.

"What's happening is that the environment has opened up and it is all based on non-Microsoft standards," Coleman claims. "The browser, HTML, CGI, and XML are handling the client, and the back-end is server-based applications that are all being built on enterprise Java. Microsoft has no product built on enterprise Java. It opens up the market from top to bottom. We have increasing demand and a huge number of leads we can't get to."

BEA is targeting IBM as the company to beat for providing end-to-end e-commerce solutions and will provide more details of its channel strategy in November. BEA earlier this year struck a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co. and promises other partnerships with systems and tools vendors and with systems integrators.

Currently the company has three product lines--WebLogic server products, eLink products for enterprise application integration, and an eSolutions component line--in addition to the Tuxedo transaction processing middleware it bought from Novell Inc. in 1996.

BEA will offer resellers "e-solution component kits to bring up customers in days rather than weeks or months," Coleman said.