BEA Systems Rides Software's New Rage

In the past, wiring together data from different sources and applications could take days or weeks of expensive custom coding. Today, the same job can be done in hours, or even minutes, provided the underlying software infrastructure supports SOA. And selling that infrastructure, and the consulting services to support it, is how software vendors are cashing in on SOA.

In its most recent quarter, more than 10% of BEA's total revenue came from sales of SOA-oriented products sold under the AquaLogic brand. SOA actually adds even more revenue to BEA via sales of other products, says BEA Senior Vice President Rich Geraffo, but the company doesn't break out those additional sales.

Web services, says Geraffo, give BEA's salesforce a chance to sell additional software and service into its base of some 16,000 customers. SOA-related wins include the City of Chicago, for which BEA built an application called "make payment" that allows residents to pay taxes or a water bill or register a car. It taps 27 data sources and is used by all of the city's many agencies.

At IBM, Web services and SOA are driving sales of middleware, development tools, security software and consulting services, says Rod Smith, vice president of Big Blue's Emerging Technology Software Group. Smith, an enthusiastic evangelist for software's new big thing, likes to call his approach "Q.E.D." -- quick and easily done.

But there is a downside. "Web services are a threat to traditional integration," says Smith. (Integration is the blending of disparate applications and computer systems.) But now that software is being designed with integration in mind, the once-thriving subsector of integration vendors has dwindled to two significant players -- Tibco(TIBX Quote) and WebMethods(WEBM Quote). SOA could even threaten some of IBM's own integration revenue, but Smith figures that other SOA-related opportunities will more than make up for the potential loss.