Imagine looking around your corporate data center five years from now, and seeing no new hardware, despite huge increases in computing capacity. That's the promise of virtualization—and as an architect, you'll be the one charged with making it happen.

With average server utilization at less than 10 percent, there's currently $140 billion in excess server capacity worldwide. If you can re-architect your physical servers into a virtual server pool—and manage it well—your business could benefit from cost savings, memory savings, higher utilization, and more rapid response to its changing provisioning needs. It's an all-around win—and we at BEA are ready to help you achieve it. This issue helps you learn how: find out more from our virtualization white paper, Q&A, Webinars, and other information on the Arch2Arch Website.

» Read Java Virtualization white paper
Stop Worrying About Computing Capacity—and Start Making the Most of It

Virtualization will impact the way you design—and open up new opportunities. In this interview Stephen Hess, unit executive of the WebLogic Adaptive Products Group at BEA, sketches out the new landscape of IT.

Effective data modeling and management are essential to building a successful SOA. To take your data to the next level you need to transform it first into information and then into knowledge. Start with this article, which describes an approach to transforming data into information in SOA as part of an overall SOA transformation plan.

Virtualization plays a big part in BEA's "liquid" vision, helping to make the relationship between software and hardware more fluid—from the bottom of the stack all the way through SOA components and services. Don't miss this chance to hear BEA's virtualization experts talking about how the latest BEA products can help you deploy, scale, and migrate software assets rapidly and at lower costs.

This Gartner report discusses the wide range of portal capabilities and describes how companies are able to use the same software to deploy portals that vary in focus, functionality, and sophistication. Gartner suggests that organizations view portals as the “Swiss Army Knives” of enterprise software—tools that can be deployed in different ways to meet different business needs.

Application security has evolved dramatically over the last few years: from perimeter security focused on keeping the bad guys out to fine-grained control over what people are allowed to do in enterprise applications. In this article, David Garrison, product manager for BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, explains how a new approach to entitlements management helps ensure application security in the Internet age.

BEA is launching three new products designed to bring Web 2.0 and social computing to the enterprise. BEA AquaLogic Pages, BEA AquaLogicEnsemble, and BEA AquaLogic Pathways are each designed to empower end-user participation in the workplace while giving IT the management and governance control that core enterprise systems and processes require.

You probably already know that a mashup is a Website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. But with the recent explosion in popularity of sites such as MySpace and YouTube, they're also part of a revolution of new-media applications and services. At this half-day event, you can find out how mashups are changing the Web user experience and how they're impacting enterprise computing.