BEA Pours It On.

BEA announced its BEA Project Sierra named, Liquid Computing, at the company's 2004 eWorld conference. An amalgam of current and future BEA technologies centering on Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), Liquid Computing is basically the company's answer to the On Demand initiative of IBM. In other words, Liquid Computing, a vision of an SOA-based enterprise application infrastructure that will dynamically adapt to shifting business demand, is primarily a marketing concept. Not that technology-driven BEA has any shortage of interesting stuff to back up its vision. One week before eWorld, the company unveiled its Beehive Project, an open source implementation of the run-time container underlying WebLogic Workshop. The eWorld show also saw the formal announcement of Alchemy, a collection of technologies for mobile application development and deployment, and Quicksilver, a Web services-based enterprise services bus. Last but not least, a new Process Edition of WebLogic Server will draw on the platform's integration capabilities to enable composite application development. The problem for BEA is threefold. First, Liquid Computing's exaltation of SOA may be right but with IBM and Microsoft in the game, their technology sounds imitative. Second, with the exception of WebLogic Server Process Edition, none of the technologies announced at eWorld has a definite ship date. More difficult is that slumping licenses and stock value have put BEA under pressure and raised expectations that eWorld could not meet.