09/11/2007

BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) and Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that they have signed an agreement across four products in their respective portfolios.

ebizQ received the following:

The companies will work together to provide customers with a powerful design environment for rich Internet application (RIA) development. Separately, they will bring together best in class application server technology to help enterprises develop customer engagement applications.

Under the terms of the agreement, BEA will bundle Adobe® Flex™ Builder™ 2 software with BEA Workshop™ Studio, empowering developers to rapidly build cross-platform RIAs that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure for high-performance enterprise mash-ups. Further, every Workshop Studio developer will now have access to Flex technology for building RIAs.

The agreement also calls for Adobe to distribute evaluation licenses of BEA’s award winning application server, WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite (ES) software. LiveCycle can be deployed with WebLogic in a wide range of applications, from mission critical clustered environments to single server departmental deployments and developer desktops. Now enterprises can evaluate LiveCycle ES on BEA WebLogic Server through a seamless installation process that will be included with the LiveCycle ES product line.

New Workshop Studio Bundle to Deliver Service-Enabled RIAs for the Enterprise

The combination of Flex Builder and Workshop Studio is designed to provide a seamless workflow for quickly and easily building powerful new applications, such as interactive data dashboards, customer and employee self-service applications, and business-to-business applications. Because the applications are deployed using the ubiquitous Adobe Flash® Player runtime, businesses can reach their intended audience, regardless of platform or operating system. The new Workshop Studio bundle includes Flex Builder 2, Adobe’s Eclipse-based IDE, and the Adobe Flex™ SDK, which is planned to be released under the open source Mozilla Public License. The bundle is designed to allow developers to quickly and easily add rich interactivity to enterprise applications that help users make better business decisions.

These RIAs can then be integrated with other BEA products, such as those from the company’s WebLogic and AquaLogic product families, to help businesses realize the benefits of Web 2.0 and SOA at the enterprise level. Organizations also will be able to deploy these applications using Adobe® Integrated Runtime (AIR), a new cross-operating system application runtime that allows developers to extend RIAs to the desktop.

"Our partnership with BEA builds on our commitment to the developer community with opportunities to extend and enhance our offerings and fuel the ecosystem of RIA development,” said David Wadhwani, vice president, Engineering, RIA Platform at Adobe. “This agreement brings together two great integrated tools and gives developers an unparalleled environment for creating dynamic and engaging RIAs."

Adobe to Distribute Evaluation Version of WebLogic Server with LiveCycle ES

Additionally under the agreement, customers will be able to deploy LiveCycle ES applications that call for the high performance characteristics of BEA WebLogic Server, including Java™ Message Service (JMS) in support of business events, clustering and failover, as well as key web services interoperability technologies and standards such as WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. This is the second major release of LiveCycle to support WebLogic Server to date, but this new partnership marks the first time that LiveCycle ES customers will be provided with turn-key infrastructure for enterprise deployments.

“We are pleased to be working with Adobe and enabling them to provide reliable, scalable and standards compliant infrastructure for LiveCycle ES," said Bill Roth, vice president of Workshop Products at BEA. "In partnering with Adobe we continue to demonstrate our ability to provide the most robust application infrastructure software on the market today."