BEA to deliver Web 2.0 apps for business in July

BEA Systems in July will ship a series of corporate search and collaboration products designed around Web technologies.

The three products--Aqualogic Pages, Aqualogic Pathways, Aqualogic Ensemble--will initially be aimed primarily at customers of BEA's portal products but the company expects them to have broader appeal. Each will be sold individually, said Ajay Gandhi, director of emerging products at BEA's Business Interaction Division.

The infrastructure software company showed off early versions of the products at its customer conference last year and originally divulged plans for the product line back in 2005.

The common theme of the three products is the application of Web-based technologies, such as RSS feeds and bookmarking, for business collaboration.

Aqualogic Pages is an enterprise wiki application that's designed to let business users combine different sources of structured information, such as RSS feeds, and share those Web pages with others.

Aqualogic Pages lets people drop widgets onto a Web pages that collect information from the Web and corporate data sources.

(Credit: BEA Systems)

Another product aimed at the end users, rather than a developer, is Aqualogic Pathways which is a tool for improving enterprise search using tags and bookmarking, said Gandhi. People can create automated feeds that combine corporate and Internet information.

Aqualogic Ensemble, which will be sold to Web application developers and IT professionals, is a platform for building mashups.

Each of them are designed so that people can get to back-end business databases and applications using light-weight technologies. They also tie into corporate security systems and directories so IT people can control access to data, Gandhi said.