BEA will also revise its own products so that all of them will support mSA by the end of 2008. The company plans to introduce WorkSpace 360 components throughout 2007, company officials said.

This will allow mSA to work with BEA's three core products lines, the WebLogic application server, the AquaLogic data integration platform and its Tuxedo transaction processing environment.

With the announcement of WorkSpace 360, the company isn't really introducing radically new technology, said Michael Dortch, principal business analyst with the Robert Frances Group, based in Westport, Conn.

"The challenge is in integrating it all in ways that enable enterprises to realize the business benefits SOAs have promised to date," Dortch said.

"The really good news here is that BEA has a unified, integrated message about its offerings that [aligns] closely with the key challenges and opportunity that SOAs present to enterprise IT decision makers," he said.

Read more here about how BEA is adding more SOA capabilities to its Tuxedo 1.1 transaction processing environment.

"Also, BEA understands that many of these challenges are cultural and political, not technological," he said, adding that the company is trying to combine services and technologies in a way that addresses those cultural challenges.

For example, BEA is launching SOA for Executives, which is a suite of services aimed at enabling business and IT executives "to have more productive conversations" about SOAs, business needs and application alignment, he said.

"The other thing they are at least hinting at doing or promising to do is open up their architecture to competitors … If this works the way they want it to, it will give IT decision makers freedom of choice and the comfort of interoperability," which they always want, but don't often get a chance to experience, Dortch said.

Competitors are going to have to take notice of BEA's latest move in the SOA field, Dortch said. "BEA is too well entrenched in too many enterprise infrastructures for their competitors to ignore entirely. They are going to have to acknowledge BEA's presence, if not deliver full interoperability with BEA solutions," he said.

BEA contends that WorkSpace 360 will give businesses greater control over their application architecture because it is designed to bring the key decision makers together as the development process cycles from establishing business requirements through application design and implementation.

These decision makers include business analysts, enterprise architects, application developers and IT operations managers who are typically involved in application design. But the application design process frequently doesn't allow these different interests to work together effectively through the entire development and implementation process, BEA said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.