During an interview at the BEA Federal Technology Symposium here last week, Alfred Chuang, chairman and CEO of BEA, in San Jose, Calif., said the company has something in store for its competitors in this arena. The move will offer enterprises looking to build SOAs (service-oriented architectures) using Web services another choice in an expanding field of providers.

"We have a project going inside the company," Chuang said. "We do have a bus today. But there are several challenges. One is in a one-to-many broadcasting model; most of the transactional buses are not designed for that. Right now, we have much more of a many-to-many model. So we are in the process of building a bus specifically to handle short-span messages."

An ESB, akin to middleware for Web services and SOAs, is a distributed layer on top of an underlying messaging infrastructure. Chuang said such new architectures are needed to keep up with the changing nature of Web transactions.

"What happened is that the world in information systems is colliding with multimedia," Chuang said. "All of a sudden, you have clips, you have pictures, you have things that people want to send. So I think that has caused a different level of what people are expecting a transaction is and what gets lumped into it. And that's caused us to rethink what's inside the bus."

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