Mark Carges, who is reponsible for the Business Interaction Division (BID) of BEA, just finished his keynote address. He focused on SOA 360/Workshop 360, which, as I understand it, is just a name for all the BEA technologies including the WebLogic family, Tuxedo and the AquaLogic family.
He started by building a strong case for not turning your SOA applications into their own silos, but instead using ALUI and ALBPM to cross the “whitespace” between siloed applications to bridge people, process and technology into your overall SOA strategy.
He closed with an impressive demo of Builder and Graffiti, two new initiatives coming out of BID (which includes the acquired companies Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline). During the demo (and after recovering from a Firefox crash — eek), Mark showed how you can drag-and-drop data grids (from Siebel), free-form collaborative tools and experts that came from a nice Graffiti tag-cloud driven search. The end result was a wiki-like “situational application” that included content from enterprise applications, documents and people. What differentiates a Builder Workspace from consumer Web 2.0 applications is that Builder Workspaces include security, governance, scalability and everything else you would come to expect from an enterprise application.
Very impressive. And, not surprisingly, it’s all coming from the engineers who were once part of Plumtree. 😉