BEA's WebLogic Portal wins 'Product of the Year' award

BEA Systems, which has been making rapid inroads into the Middle East IT market, was honoured with the Product of the Year award for its WebLogic Portal in the "Enterprise Content & Collaboration Technologies" category, by a panel of analysts, consultants and the editors of Transform Magazine, the leading American IT magazine. The magazine lauded BEA for integrating the WebLogic Portal with its application server and providing a strong foundation for custom application development. In selecting winners, the magazine looked for innovations in technology, outstanding feature-to-cost ratios and proven market success. Among the features singled out by the magazine editors was the open architecture of BEA's WebLogic Portal 7.0 that lets customers work with BEA's integration server or third party tools to invoke business processes through the portals as well as strong security, scalability, fault tolerance and solid portal features.

"The accolade from such a prestigious magazine adds to the growing tally of awards already won by the WebLogic Portal from the industry and media, consolidating BEA's position as a leading portal vendor," said Diyaa Zebian, Business Development Manager Middle East, e-Solutions BEA. "WebLogic is designed to give customers the ability to deliver on their business initiatives at a lower cost, with the flexibility to change as their business dictates. The acceptance of WebLogic by well-known business houses worldwide, is prompting companies in the Middle East to use it for gaining a competitive edge in today's changing business scenario. Two of the premium organizations in the Middle East to adopt BEA's WebLogic Portal are Etisalat and the Saudi American Bank, both of which have incorporated it into their infrastructure to employ business processes through the portals."

Since the debut of BEA WebLogic Portal, the industry and media have recognized BEA as a leading portal vendor. Gartner's Magic Quadrant report on the portal product market positioned BEA in the leader's quadrant for vision and ability to execute, and Forrester Research, Giga Information Group, Current Analysis 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, a 2002 Reader's Choice Award for the Best Java Enterprise Portal by Java Pro Magazine, and was awarded the 2001 InfoWorld Technology of the Year honor in the portal software category.

The recognition from Transform Magazine, regarded as a leading publication for business and IT managers, has come close on the heels of BEA's announcement that over 60 new customers have adopted the BEA WebLogic Integration in the third quarter of 2002, driving a 25 per cent increase in revenue for the product over the previous quarter. The achievement has underscored the rising market recognition that a standards-based development and integration platform was superior to proprietary and rigid offerings from traditional integration vendors.

"BEA's WebLogic Integration is a comprehensive, unified integration platform to connect users, applications and systems that can reduce the cost and complexity of automating business processes. It simplifies a company's ability to develop and integrate applications in order to customize processes and align them more directly with business goals and has helped a growing number of customers to make business processes more efficient, improve information visibility and bolster application flexibility," said Zebian.

"Emirates Bank International, one of the leading financial institutions in the region, and the flagship organization of the Emirates Bank Group, recently adopted BEA's Weblogic Integration 7.0 as part of the WebLogic Platform 7.0 in order to ensure the seamless integration of the multiple IT systems currently operational at the bank. The Weblogic Integration 7.0 has also enabled EBI to upgrade its banking system to provide a common platform for multiple applications.

"There is an increasingly high demand for BEA Weblogic Portal and Integration in the Middle East as businesses in the region can now migrate to BEA platforms and draw benefits from systems that are now powering world's most ambitious companies to higher efficiency and productivity," he added. "In recent months, BEA has entered into alliance with key regional players to showcase the advantages of BEA products and solutions. These new successes will drive many other companies to adopt our acclaimed systems."

BEA WebLogic Integration continues to record robust growth in the global financial services, telecommunications and logistics sectors with new customers including British Telecommunications plc (BT), Department of Work and Pensions (UK), Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, Daiwa Securities America, Sofaxis (France) and Towers Perrin, UICI to name just a few. To date, more than 350 customers worldwide have adopted the BEA WebLogic Integration.