Yehuda Confortes
DailyMaily, ThePeople
Edition No. 4152 - Monday, February 20, 2006

Larry Ellison’s declaration last week about his intention to purchase JBoss has put the suppliers and companies involved in .NET and JAVA-based integration and platform development under a lot of pressure, prompting them to announce their intentions and advancement towards SOA.

One of the main companies in the market dealing with JAVA-based development is BEA, represented in Israel by LIAM, part of the One1 Group. BEA has come a long way in Israel, since purchasing the local agency represented by LIAM in 1987, and starting to run a sales and marketing operation locally.

Less than a year after the purchase, BEA reversed its intention to operate its branch in Israel due to the local economic-security atmosphere, among other reasons, and sold its activities to LIAM which was purchased by One1. WebLogic is BEA’s main product, which competes with Oracle, SAP and mainly IBM (WebSphere) tools. The route to Web services passes through complicated integration projects which require skills and expertise.

BEA aspires to be the developers’ preference for Web services in JAVA environments. Tomer Sapir, LIAM CEO for the past 3 years, says that BEA’s sales volume through LIAM reaches about 25 million shekels. 

WORKING WITH PARTNERS

BEA usually operates through business partners. One of its most successful partners is eWave, managed by Oren Shuster and Rafi Gabay. eWave is located in kibbutz Glil Yam near Herzeliya, in a pastoral location, overlooking the beautiful view of the kibbutz’s fields and the Mediterranean Sea to the west.

"eWave works with everything that involves development and integration of information management systems," explains Shuster - eWave CEO.
”Around 200 employees are currently employed at eWave, and this number is growing rapidly. Prior to us purchasing WiDE from Walla, Microsoft was our main area of expertise; but since then, we expanded our activities to the JAVA domain, in which BEA is naturally an integral player,” Oren clarifies.

eWave works on two levels - on the BEA WebLogic platform, which is a complete platform that enables project completion in a short timeframe and low cost to the customer - and as a BEA integrator. "We implement enterprise application intergration (EAI) projects, develop self-service systems and more,” he indicates.

“The talk of the transition to development and management services on the Web is well recognized in Israel,” says Shuster. ”We are witnessing an awakening and significant growth in the market. A large part of our solutions is based on proven infrastructures, which is a huge advantage, as well as our ability to provide solutions using competing technologies like Microsoft and JAVA."

THE BARAK PROJECT

One of the successful projects implemented in Israel by eWave and BEA took place at the telecommunicaions company, Barak. Barak’s CIO, Eli Ben Simon, speaks very highly of eWave and says that eWave sets an example of implementing EAI projects and combined portals without increasing costs or extending the timeframe. eWave is undoubtedly an example of a software company that is going to flourish as long as more and more organizations base their activities on the internet.

eWave’s development tools, integration experience and solutions, have already established their reputation overseas, partly thanks to some assistance from BEA's international organization, which sees eWave as a business partner, even though they use competing development platforms. 

GOING HEAD TO HEAD WITH IBM

Finally, Sapir says: "SOA (service oriented architecture) is where BEA is headed next. Nowadays, systems are implemented with Web Services orientation while integrating JAVA and Microsoft technologies. Our main competitor is IBM, which is more commonly found in banks, while we are found in most of the other sectors, especially  in the telecom, start-up and international companies that base all their billing methods and customer relationship management (CRM) on BEA platforms. With the entrance of SOA, we now turning towards banks as well. The user friendly interface and rapid implementation of BEA are our advantages compared to IBM.”