BEA Analyst Summit 2006: BEA Vision, Alfred Chuang

Here is some gonzo/live coverage of the BEA analyst summit. There’s little time for linking, and pardon any spelling problems. Most everything is a quote/summarizing. My own comments are typically in square brackets…unless I’m doing the old “square brackets in quotes” trick.

Of interest to Steve, I’m using TextMate instead of emacs. So far, I like it. I’ll have to see if it’s worth 30 euros…Alex’s white on black suggestion is very pleasing. Anyone know how to make TextMate wrap <p> tags around a block of text? I’d love to be able to do Esc-q (as in emacs) to both format a paragraph and wrap it in a <p>. I’d pay 30 euros for that, dear readers.

Waiting

Music provided by Beck’s “Girl.” Power-strips and plenty of free notebooks with pens. [Like a dunder-head, I forgot my plug upstairs, I’ll have to go fetch it.]

Video Intro

Video of flexibility, liquid, lots of “the stuff to help you realize your ideas.” Dude, BEA is “unlike any other software company out there.” Know this! “It’s time to start thinking liquid.”

Alfred Chuang, CEO

…worked hard to create SOA mastership.

…machine on the roll again.

…use our momentum to propel us into future success. Roadmaps, products, people’s silly laptop sounds.

[An IRC channel would be cool.]

… Hope you think we’ve taken your criticism and suggestions to improve itself. Proud of team. We are successful. Jam-packed program. We love to fire-hose everyone because this is a rare opportunity to get to all of you. We want you to know everything about BEA, really, there is a lot to know.

…yesterday were financial analysts. “It was a great day.” We’re here to take your input.

…smaller, more elite group of people (shucks).

…AquaLogic is the big thing. “The real deal.” SOA: “we think it comes from you [the analysts].”

…sales people selling well.

…Last year, I said we’d do better by kick up go to market. much better job selling what we have. new products aimed at growth market. Green vs. Gold, as BMC called it.

…AOL ripped out it’s entire homegrown to BEA in Q1(?).

…AOL wanted to change biz model. AOL bought AquaLogic ESB. So, we’ll see how that goes.

…WebLogic and Tuxedo not forgotten! AquaLogic and WLS for SOA. VoIP. WebLogic Edge server for RFID.

…leader in application infrastructure market.

…[He’s quite frequent at saying, “what you suggested,” “what you called it,” “the ideas you had,” and more “you”].

…Dog-fooding. BEA is SOA based. “A standard has to emerge for the new generation of web based systems. And we are the only company that has a complete [offering] for SOA.” We believe no one else does.

…WLS orders grew 11%. WLS 9.0 released. “Amazing performance…performance is never a commodity…a product loaded with features that customer has been asking for.”

…”WLS is the world’s only hot-swappable” container. No need to shut down server when you upgrade.

…When my favorite auction site goes down, and I’m looking to bid on something, and I see the site is down, it really, really pisses me off.

Demo of Canned Trading App

…we’re looking at WLS 9.0 console. New console that’s Struts based. The gradient buttons and light colored scheme.

…if user is in the middle of trading, when you upgrade, it waits for use to finish trading with old version. “So, Alfred, as you can see, this is our hot-swap deployment in action.”

Travis Bennet, “star sales exec”

…eHealth Insurance. 100% of biz online, so they need lots of uptime. Weekly releases. With WLS 8.0 “and every other [app server] on the market,” they had to bring down the system, not selling, every week.

Alfred: “why didn’t they just get the free stuff?”

Travis: IBM and Oracle tried to get in there, Oracle giving away the app server. But “the reality is that we’re providing these features that our competitors can’t provide.” They liked the hot-swapping/deploying.

Alfred Goes Back to SOA

Customers are ready to spend big money on SOA. Looking for business transformation and optimization.

Blake Shows us AquaLogic Demo

“One of the things that resonates with customers is that it’s configuration based” not developer based so you don’t need to bring in a team of programmers to change something.

Adding a broadband partner to a service where you sign up with a new broadband provider, AquaLink. The idea is to show you the ease of use of adding stuff in composite applications.

AquaLogic registry. Search for service. Next. Import service. “And with a couple of clicks, I can now have this service available to me.” Now we need to select this broadband provider.

A wizard where he selects a conditional/branch when they choose aqualink they go to the new service…with a drop down where. So, when a user chooses aqualink, it goes to the service selected.

“I think this SOA architecture is the real-deal.” You helped push us in the last year and half. The days of having [to have] an enormous amount of J2EE skill, etc., [to run your applications] is diminishing [because BEA will give you the easy to use tools to do it without programmers].

Telcos

“All of the top 50 telcos run on BEA”…is that true? Run what?

25 proof of concepts…lots of subscribers…high bandwidth technology going into people’s home…allowing biz apps to run “so much differently.”

“you can’t buy market-share in our market. we’re not like a bank. the market share lasts only until the next release.” culture of the company not good for acquisition.”

[Get distracted talking about SOA sysmgmt with Bill.]

Tripled size of R&D organization. Job to stay 18-20 months ahead. we’ll never ever let out competition catch us again. We’re focused on what we do: we don’t sell DBs, computers, etc. “I believe that we’re the only true middle-ware company for a long time.”

Disclaimer: BEA, IBM, MSFT, and BMC are clients. BEA payed for me to come to this conference.