Feature Article: Monday, 3/3/03

BEA, HP CEOs Kick Off BEA eWorld 2003

In an explosion of laser lights and a rain of smoke, BEA Founder, Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang appeared on stage to kick off this year's eWorld 2003 conference Monday in Orlando, Fla.

Chuang began his speech by thanking the more than 2,000 developers, IT managers, and CIOs who are attending eWorld 2003.

"You are the people who make BEA possible. We never lose sight of that," he said.

But he quickly shifted to the main topic of his keynote: convergence. Chuang explained to the crowd why application development and integration need to converge.

Until now, Chuang said, "IT has been more a Tower of Babel than a Garden of Eden." He explained that the lack of a standard application infrastructure platform has prevented enterprises from leveraging legacy systems and from building the applications their businesses need for competitive advantage.

At BEA, he said, "convergence means bringing together application development and application integration into one unified framework. Today we're delivering convergence as we deliver WebLogic Enterprise Platform 8.1... WebLogic 8.1 delivers the future while leveraging the past."

Chuang's speech segued smoothly into an address from HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina.

As the leader who shepherded HP through one of the largest mergers in history (with Compaq), Fiorina said she identified clearly with eWorld's theme of convergence.

"I'm CEO of a company that's thought a lot about convergence in the past three years. From where we sit, convergence is just another word for the fundamental reality that all CIOs face in today's world – namely, that the value proposition of IT needs to change," Fiorina said.

IT's mission is shifting from ensuring stability to enabling agility, Fiorina continued. "You have to be able to adapt your infrastructure more rapidly and deploy systems in real time to meet your business needs."

Fiorina said that HP's partnership with BEA allows the two companies to deliver solutions that leverage the two companies' strengths. "Our partnership with BEA is absolutely integral to how we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace," she said.

HP and BEA have deepened the partnership in a number of ways during the past year, Fiorina explained, including global alignment of the companies' products and services, commitments to cosell, and tight integration of consulting and integration services.

Fiorina also took the opportunity to make several announcements about HP's Web services management strategy. Among the announcements, Fiorina said that HP is working with BEA and other partners to create a dedicated Web services management and deployment practice for J2EE solutions within HP's Services group. The group's current staff of 450 consultants will grow to 1,000 within the year.

In addition, HP plans to distribute a Web services management framework to the OASIS standards consortium within the next few months.

Fiorina cited both HP and BEA as leaders in open standards, and pointed out that this commitment to standards differentiates the companies from competitors like IBM.

"IBM is providing vertically integrated, monolothic solution stacks just as they did in the '80s – talk about time machines," she said, referring to one of IBM's recent television commercials.

That commitment to standards and to customers allows BEA and HP to provide greater value to customers, Fiorina said. For example, she mentioned a recent project that BEA, HP, and Intel completed for Bank of New York ( Download the presentation). The project, which the bank initiated to investigate open standards-based technologies, resulted in 70 percent higher transaction throughput as well as 46 percent savings over the bank's existing infrastructure.

That type of cost savings is exactly what HP and BEA can provide to the companies represented by attendees at eWorld, Fiorina concluded: "We believe the alliance between BEA and HP helps you turn IT into a competitive weapon."

Download the presentation (PDF | 160K)