BEA to resell AmberPoint SOA manager

BEA Systems and AmberPoint have decided to tie the knot just a little bit tighter. BEA has announced that it will resell, rebrand, and provide first-level support for AmberPoint's SOA Management System as the AquaLogic SOA Management (ALSM).

We found that in a large number of deals, we were in there with AmberPojnt, said Paul Patrick, vice president and chief architect of AquaLogic products. In fact, BEA has had arms length ties with AmberPoint and its rival SOA Software ever since the dawning of the AquaLogic brand a couple years ago (SOA was present at the AquaLogic coming out event held at NASDAQ's headquarters back in June 2005).

The result has been something of an arms race, as each tool has upped it management capabilities (typically through agents and probes), with the various WebLogic and AquaLogic offerings.

For instance, back in November, SOA Software added the capability to anticipate service policies on BEA's AquaLogic Service Bus (the ESB offering). So if AquaLogic is using SAML for federated identity, it would understand that a service request headed for an endpoint on a Microsoft .NET platform would have to convert the header to the WS-Federation protocol.

But, as BEA comprises AmberPoint largest customer base, it made sense for the company to addle up closer. And in fact it counters a recent tie-in between SOA Software and Red Hat's JBoss where both companies agreed to step up joint development work to more tightly embed SOA's agents inside JBoss servers. But the SOA/JBoss agreement stopped short of rebranding.

In coming months, BEA and AmberPoint will work to penetrate AmberPoint's agents throughout more products in the WebLogic and AquaLogic lines. The initial version of AquaLogic SOA Management should be released by June.

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