BEA Delivers Industry's First Unified Portal PlatformBEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 Features Native Support for Web Services to Simplify Portal DevelopmentSAN JOSE, Calif. — July 8, 2002 — BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS), the world’s leading application infrastructure software company, today unveiled BEA WebLogic® Portal 7.0, the latest version of its award-winning enterprise portal software. BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0™ is designed to simplify the development, deployment and management of enterprise-wide portals, and is the industry’s first unified portal platform that can natively support Web services. BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 is available for download from www.bea.com. Businesses planning enterprise-wide portals to improve operational efficiency, increase revenues, and decrease costs are turning to BEA WebLogic Portal. More than half of BEA WebLogic Portal customers have deployed, or plan to deploy, enterprise-wide portals targeting their customers, employees and business partners. In contrast, a majority of today’s portal products target standalone departmental portals. According to a June report by IDC, the enterprise information portal software market is expected to grow from $550.4 million in 2001 to $3.1 billion in 2006. New administration tools of BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 are designed to quickly consume and display Web services created in BEA WebLogic Workshop™, Microsoft SOAP ToolKit clients, or other tools. While other vendors’ portal products offer Web services only as add-on modules, BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 includes native features and tools that developers can use to easily build Web services-powered portals. BEA’s new portal and portlet wizards can reduce time to market by slashing portal development time by 95 percent. In addition to new partner portlets available from the BEA Portal Solution Center, BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 ships with new collaboration portlets and commerce portlets for catalog, shopping cart, purchasing process, and other commerce services. "BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 simplifies portal development and administration, and is built on the most scalable and extensible software architecture on the market -- a differentiator unmatched by any of our competitors," said Pat O’Haren, senior director of product marketing, BEA Systems. "By including Web services and emerging portal standards directly into BEA WebLogic Portal, we are helping businesses lower the cost of providing employees, customers and business partners personalized access to information, applications and business processes." Since the debut of BEA WebLogic Portal, the industry and media have recognized BEA as a leading portal vendor. Gartner’s May 2002 Magic Quadrant report on the portal product market positioned BEA in the leader’s quadrant for vision and ability to execute, and both Forrester Research and AMR Research include BEA WebLogic Portal on their recommended portal software lists. BEA WebLogic Portal also won a 2002 Codie Award for Best Enterprise Portal Solution from the Software & Information Industry Association, and was awarded the 2001 InfoWorld Technology of the Year honor in the portal software category. "Portals have become the most desired interface for employees, customers and business partners to interact with a company’s processes and applications, and view a company’s information and intellectual resources," said Robert Lerner, analyst, Current Analysis. "BEA WebLogic Portal empowers application developers with tools to quickly create new portlets with Web services, and provides business users with personalization, campaign, and administration tools that can increase customer satisfaction and site manageability." About BEABEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) is the world's leading application infrastructure software company, providing the enterprise software foundation for 13,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. BEA and its WebLogic® brand are among the most trusted names in business. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., BEA has 91 offices in 33 countries and is on the Web at www.bea.com. Public Relations Contacts:Susan Siegel Ron Piovesan BEA, BEA Tuxedo, BEA WebLogic, BEA WebLogic Enterprise, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, BEA WebLogic Server, BEA WebLogic Integration, BEA WebLogic Portal, and BEA WebLogic Workshop are trademarks or registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the company with which they are associated. |