BEA Introduces AquaLogic Commerce Services – Press Release

Some big news around Elastic Path recently is the burgeoning relationship with BEA. We’ll get into this topic in much more depth soon with EP’s “away team” who were on location for BEA’s festival in Las Vegas.

In the meantime, the gist is: BEA’s new AquaLogic Commerce Services product is an OEM of Elastic Path.

As such, BEA’s massive salesteam and international legions of customers will now be able to easily integrate EP’s innovative ecommerce platform seamlessly into their system architecture for maximum convenience, while continuing to enjoy the legendary performance of BEA’s Java machine.

Here’s the full press release on BEA and Elastic Path relationship from Web Wire:

BEA Introduces AquaLogic Commerce Services, A New eCommerce Solution Designed to Help Drive Online Sales

BEA and Elastic Path Ignite Strategic Partnership to Add Services for Commerce Storefront, Management and Integration

Core News Facts:

1) BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services can help online retailers make it easier for shoppers to find what they need and complete the transaction quickly and with complete confidence

2) The new BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services incorporates market leading search engine optimization technology based on Elastic Path

3) eCommerce has become an important component for all retailers and is often the highest growth part of their business.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — February 20, 2007 — BEA Systems, Inc., a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the general availability of BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services, a new eCommerce product powered by Elastic Path eCommerce software. The new BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services (ALCS) product is designed to help companies increase online sales by attracting and converting their customers profitably. Using BEA ALCS, customers can help improve organic store search engine rankings, help shoppers find products faster, reduce shopping cart abandonment, boost average order value and improve customer experience. Additionally, BEA ALCS can help companies reduce integration costs as well as update and maintenance efforts.

To help customers to obtain a fast return on eCommerce, BEA ALCS leverages the out-of-the-box capabilities and ease of use that have helped contribute to Elastic Path’s success with over 100 sites, including Florsheim Shoes, Garmin, Aeroplan and Xerox. These features include a search engine optimization (SEO) system to deliver top rankings for the type of detailed searches that buyers use, one of the industry’s first extensively AJAX-based eCommerce system, and the use of Web services to simplify the communication between eCommerce and other customer data systems. The initial release of BEA ALCS includes integration with both BEA WebLogic Server® and BEA WebLogic Portal®, helping unify the customer experience across the store, Web applications and portals. Future releases will be designed to further exploit the advantages of a platform-based eCommerce system, including ease of integration and improved cross-channel visibility.

“According to our research, within the next 24 months over 58 percent of online businesses will improve their existing web sites, and 22 percent will purchase a new platform altogether,” said John Lovett, research analyst at Aberdeen Group. “Sixty-six percent of companies with a multi-channel sales strategy are making these changes to obtain a 360 degree view of their customers. The dominant strategy for accomplishing this customer centric approach is focused on three key areas: Customer Management, Merchandising and Inventory Management and Data Management. Technology vendors that directly assist companies to centralize databases and provide visibility into their inventory and customer management systems can ultimately improve the customer experience.”

“The robust commerce technology in BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services has helped us to diversify our product offerings, expand our business partnerships and eliminate some barriers to revenue growth,” said Rémi Lafrance, director of technology for architecture, strategy and operations at Aeroplan, one of the world’s premier loyalty marketing companies. “We’ve become more effective at converting customer contact into revenue. Our business has increased significantly and we have a strong foundation for future commerce growth.”

BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services includes three major functional areas:

• Commerce Storefront to help improve the effectiveness of the store and customer experience through search engine optimization, cross-sell and up-sell capabilities, dynamic page creation, one-page checkout, intuitive shopping cart and customer self-service;

• Commerce Management to help support all backend processes and management for handling orders and returns, maintaining a catalog and customer profiles and handling promotions;

• Commerce Integration to help integrate the commerce storefront and operations with key enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business process management/business intelligence and (BPM/BI) and supply chain management (SCM).

“With BEA’s leadership role in SOA and Web services combined with Elastic Path’s strength in commerce and SEO, we believe the partnership will help deliver an efficiency and profitability advantage to BEA customers,” said Dan Tortorici, director of product marketing at BEA Systems. “The new BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services is a flexible alternative that is designed to offer customers low cost of ownership and increased profitability with their online store as it can be easily managed by the business and adapted to accommodate changing sales tactics.”

BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services is designed to provide a commerce site in conjunction with both Web applications running on WebLogic Server and with portals built with WebLogic Portal. In a future release it will be designed to also support the BEA AquaLogic Interaction portal. [Note: minor edit from original release] More information at: AquaLogic Commerce Services.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA delivers the unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization in order to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to achieve Business LiquidITy™ can be found at www.bea.com.