BEA, Partners Team on Horizontal Enterprise Solutions

BEA Systems Inc. this week launched a program focused on delivering horizontal solutions, including technology from BEA and several of its partners.

The program, known as the BEA Enterprise Solutions program, will center around the BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 and will feature products and services from more than 40 partners, said Mark Atherton, vice president of the enterprise solutions group at San Jose, Calif.-based BEA.

As part of the program, BEA announced its Solution Frameworks, a series of components and services aimed at helping customers deliver solutions in five areas: customer service, employee service, service delivery, trade processing and RFID (radio frequency identification).

Customer service is the first area BEA has chosen to focus on with the release this week of its Customer Service Solution Framework.

Assisting BEA in delivering the Customer Service Solution Framework are BEA partners Hyperion Solutions Corp., EMC Corp. and Interwoven Inc.

“We’re unveiling the solution program overall,” Atherton said. “This is something BEA started in 2002, and we’ve been driving it pretty hard. We’re focusing on the Customer Service Solution Framework as the first of the five solutions we’ll deliver.”

Why focus on customer service? “Seventy-two percent of CIOs said customer service is their number one priority,” Atherton said. “And many customer implementations of BEA platforms have been focused on customer-facing applications. There is a large market out there, and it’s a high priority for CEOs and a pretty clear pain point.”

Click here to read about a version of BEA’s application suite targeted at its ISV partners.

In addition, the solution frameworks are focused on helping customers create and deploy SOAs (service-oriented architectures). The frameworks will include sales and marketing tools, best practices, support and services.

Atherton said BEA had three main goals when it began work on the solutions program: “To speak to the trends in the market, to advance go-to-market opportunities with partners, and extend the reach of the programs themselves.”

Atherton added: “This is another example of how we’re trying to drive innovation to outpace the competition.”

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