City of Chicago Selects BEA AquaLogic Product Family to Extend SOA Initiatives
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BEA Helps Empower Government Agencies to Deliver Better Customer Services to City Residents, Improve Collections
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16 / -- BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BEAS), a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced that the City of Chicago has implemented BEA AquaLogic Service Bus(TM) and AquaLogic Data Services Platform(TM) in an effort to help the city develop and manage its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives. The city's SOA projects are designed to enable the delivery of reusable services that improve the efficiency of city business, including activities such as the issuing of city car registration stickers, building permit data research and payment processing.
By building onto the SOA that was implemented two years prior using the BEA WebLogic Platform(TM) and employing AquaLogic Service Bus and AquaLogic Data Services Platform, the City of Chicago has been able to leverage a single infrastructure framework that allows the city's various agencies to share information and human resources across city IT systems. The single infrastructure enables better access to resident data, a function that allows each department to more effectively share data and collect payments.
The city deployed AquaLogic Service Bus to serve as the messaging bus and AquaLogic Data Services Platform to provide real-time data aggregation on top of the existing WebLogic Platform. With the help of BEA professional services the city then designed a centralized architecture.
"To keep pace with today's business demands, we needed to empower our IT team and make the processes that are essential to helping the City of Chicago work faster," said Eric Peebles, chief enterprise application architect, City of Chicago. "BEA AquaLogic and WebLogic products have played a critical role towards our first foray into SOA. As a result, we're realizing many strategic benefits, including a dramatic reduction in overhead costs and the ability to quickly get to market with new functionality."
"The work that City of Chicago has done using the AquaLogic and WebLogic products truly represents a best practices approach to SOA," said Bruce Graham, vice president of BEA consulting and worldwide SOA practice leader. "Instead of taking a big bang approach to SOA, which can be daunting and overwhelming, the city is successfully realizing its SOA goals incrementally, starting with one payment service and then growing into a substantial SOA solution."
The results of the SOA functions are improving the city's bottom line and ability to provide services. For example, thanks to a new car registration sticker application that pulls information from across city agencies, the city will be able to identify residents who live in the city and should have purchased a vehicle registration but did not. As a result, the city is expecting sticker revenue to increase by 20 percent in the coming year.
Prior to selecting AquaLogic, the City of Chicago had already implemented WebLogic Platform(TM) to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP), citizen relationship management (CRM), billing, finance and data warehousing with dozens of smaller applications. As a result, the city was able to expose data and functionality to desktop and self-service Web applications that are used to sell and administer nearly every aspect of city business. This best-of- breed approach ultimately allows the City of Chicago to provide residents with outstanding service in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost.
The WebLogic Platform was chosen over competing platform architectures because the software employs standards-based technology, allows developers to create applications relatively quickly and easily and offers the ability to reuse software components built on BEA, all of which can help to reduce the cost and time that must be budgeted for future projects.
The BEA AquaLogic product suite -- which includes AquaLogic User Interaction(TM), AquaLogic Service Bus(TM), AquaLogic Data Services Platform(TM), AquaLogic Enterprise Security(TM), and AquaLogic Service Registry(TM) -- provides the service infrastructure for managing SOAs in heterogeneous IT environments. When layered on top of WebLogic, as the City of Chicago is doing, AquaLogic and WebLogic provide a powerful SOA infrastructure.
About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, providing standards-based platforms to accelerate the secure flow of information and services. BEA product lines -- WebLogic®, Tuxedo®, JRockit®, and the new AquaLogic(TM) family of Service Infrastructure -- help customers reduce IT complexity and successfully deploy Service-Oriented Architectures to improve business agility and efficiency. For more information please visit www.bea.com.
Source: BEA Systems, Inc.
CONTACT: Jim Rivas of BEA Systems, Inc., +1-408-570-8834, or
james.rivas@bea.com; or Dave Reddy of Weber Shandwick Worldwide,
+1-650-868-4659, or dreddy@webershandwick.com
Web site: www.bea.com/
