Veritas, BEA Enter Strategic Alliance

Veritas Software and BEA Systems today announced a strategic alliance to integrate their utility computing technology and embark on joint development, sales, and marketing activities together.

The joint solutions will include versions of Veritas Indepth for J2EE application performance management software, and High Availability and OpForce integrated with BEA's Weblogic and Tuxedo platforms.

The goal of the alliance is to help customers deploy enterprise applications on an open, heterogeneous utility computing platform, allow for re-usability of application services and offer greater IT adaptability and simplified management, said executives from both companies.

"Enterprise customers want to bring down IT costs. We are driving down total cost of ownership by making applications cheaper and much more automated," said Benjamin Renaud, chief technology officer for BEA. "By automating the monitoring on applications, we can then take action to deploy the application and react to products with the provisioning." Bob Maness senior director of product marketing for Veritas, added: "By integrating OpForce with BEA's Weblogic and Tuxedo we can provide provisioning and get applications into development environments faster."

Analysts said this is a move in the right direction for utility computing. "First and foremost it demonstrates that hardware and software heterogeneity are not obstacles to achieving a utility computing infrastructure," said William Hurley, senior analyst of the Enterprise Application Group base in Portland, Ore. "It also demonstrates efforts to integrate hardware or software solutions across functional domains, from storage systems to application infrastructure. This alliance allows customers to use the technology in their data center today to achieve the benefits of utility computing."Veritas Indepth for J2EE and Veritas Cluster Server with BEA WebLogic Server are available now, with pricing starting at $4,000 and $2,995, respectively. The Veritas OpForce/BEA's WebLogic Server is scheduled to be available in the second half of 2004; pricing has not yet been set.