As an architect, one of your greatest challenges is designing strategic interactions across heterogeneous hardware, software applications, development tools, and middleware components. This issue of Arch2Arch Advisor focuses on some of the ways BEA can help you meet that challenge.

For example, thanks to the recent acquisition of Fuego, BEA is now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments. We’re also offering some advice, in our upcoming service lifecycle governance Webinar, on how to establish and enforce policies for ensuring that your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) truly supports your business.

Interested in the flexibility of blended development? BEA not only talks the talk about blended development; we walk the walk, as proven by our recent donation of BEA Kodo to the Java open source community.

And if you’re in the telecom industry, explore the benefits of BEA leadership in bringing together service creation and execution functionality for new and converged Web-based services.

So start here—and let us help you create competitive advantage from a tangle of heterogeneous systems and applications.

On March 1st, BEA Systems acquired Fuego, Inc., a pioneer and leader in the business process management (BPM) software industry. Fuego specializes in providing SOA solutions to help companies orchestrate and continuously improve business processes among people, applications, and organizations. The Fuego portfolio will become a part of the fast-growing BEA AquaLogic™ product family and will serve as the foundation of the new BEA AquaLogic™ Business Service Interaction product line.

SOA can deliver ROI through service reuse and greater IT responsiveness to business needs. However, unless an organization establishes, implements, and enforces policies to ensure compliance with the standards and objectives of the business throughout the life of the service, it may never realize the promise of SOA. This Webinar explains why and how establishing governance over each phase of the service lifecycle—from publishing through promotion, deployment, management, and ultimately retirement—is essential to achieving the benefits of SOA.

As part of its commitment to blended development, BEA is open-sourcing a significant portion of the Kodo persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. A set of Java persistence APIs based on the forthcoming Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB3) standard, Open JPA can be blended with commercial technologies like BEA WebLogic Workshop™ Studio.

Take advantage of some upcoming opportunities to learn more about the potential for blended development within your organization. At EclipseCon, BEA is presenting several sessions that are ideal for architects, especially “Managing Open Source Contribution” and “Evaluating the Eclipse Tools Platform for Strategic Development.” BEA dev2dev Days—free, one-day global developer events—offer day-long intensive sessions on blended development at more than 20 venues from San Francisco to Bangalore and London.

BEA WebLogic Communications Platform™ is the first product suite to offer a converged service creation and execution platform combined with a powerful policy enforcement platform. The suite includes BEA WebLogic SIP Server™, the industry’s first converged Java EE, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) application server. Internet Telephony magazine, a leading VoIP/IP publication, named BEA WebLogic SIP Server a 2005 “Product of the Year.”

For help accelerating the adoption of Java EE-based SIP applications development using BEA WebLogic SIP Server, check out the new BEA WebLogic Communications Platform Developer Center within BEA’s dev2dev online community.

BEAWorld 2006 is on the way, with the first conference scheduled for the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, September 19-21, 2006. Save the date now! BEAWorld is the best way to stay up to date on the latest technologies and real-world implementations in SOA and enterprise infrastructure software.

We’ll let you know when BEAWorld 2006 registration is open, but in the meantime, check out BEAWorld Online, your on-demand source for the best of the six global events that made up BEAWorld 2005. We’re still uploading fresh information to this resource, so even if you’ve already visited the site, it’s worth visiting again.