At BEAWorld in San Francisco and at InfoWorld SOA Summit in New York, BEA announced the BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio, a key component of both the BEA integration strategy for SOA deployments and the recently announced BEA SOA 360º platform. The BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio includes BEA WebLogic Integration 9.2, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.5, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5, and BEA WebLogic Adapters for ERP. BEA AquaLogic Integrator (a bundled solution comprising BEA WebLogic Integration and BEA AquaLogic Service Bus) enables customers to rapidly service-enable integrated processes and integrate services in an SOA using a single, cost-effective package.

What does this mean for you? Now you can achieve integration your way, without committing to an application, database, or operating system. Now you can leverage an adaptable and highly available service-oriented infrastructure that can fluidly accommodate changing processes, resources, and trading partners. And now you can get help reaching your SOA objectives quickly and cost-effectively, regardless of where you are along the SOA adoption continuum.

SOA is all about making services available for users inside and outside an organization. Ease of access is important, but these new levels of access also call for new levels of security.

The latest versions of BEA WebLogic Integration and BEA AquaLogic Service Bus are already in place at some of the world’s largest companies, including a large commercial goods manufacturer, a U.S. airline, and a U.S. telecommunications provider.

You’ve probably heard how application functionality can be delivered as services using SOA. But how can you get the benefits of productivity, agility, and speed into the hands of your business users today? The recently released BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 embraces SOA with its unified portal framework and makes it easier than ever to deliver services, integrate content, and build customer service-oriented portals. This online Webinar will be conducted from the UK and is open to architects around the world.

This online course incorporates real-world material from the BEA SOA practice and includes a brief overview of Web services, SOA project planning, and the BEA domain model for SOA. Designed for architects, it can help you shorten time-to-value for customers, raise employee and partner productivity, control the cost of developing, integrating, and maintaining systems and applications, and turn data in diverse formats into usable information.

Dain Hansen, senior product manager for BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, has just started blogging. Check out his recent observations about the evolution of ESBs to solve business problems, not just IT problems. Also, Quinton Wall, a certified Enterprise Architect and member of the BEA internal SOA practice, weighs in with his opinion on the direction of SOA, theorizing that when SOA starts being taught in MBA courses perhaps we’ll be closer to realizing its true potential and entrepreneurial benefits.

Last month’s issue talked about the design-time aspects of the Service Lifecycle. Now you can read more about the service lifecycle’s run-time aspects, including publishing and provisioning the service, integrating the service into composite applications, deploying the service, monitoring and managing its usage, and finally, evaluating the use of the service in a realistic setting such as production.

Many companies have tried to do more with less using two separate approaches: enterprise integration and business process management (BPM). But these approaches shouldn’t be separate. In this seminar, we’ll help you see how to leverage your previous application and integration efforts to provide a flexible operational infrastructure that brings together business and IT, enabling your business to compete in an SOA world.