BEA service drops in design experts

BEA Systems detailed on Thursday a consulting service to promote its software as the foundation for a modular, flexible system design.

The infrastructure-software maker has created a "Readiness Self-Assessment" service for companies looking to build a services oriented architecture, an approach to application development that allows businesses to reuse and combine business programs, or "services." With the rise of standardized protocols and better tooling, services oriented architectures, which are supposed to lower costs and speed up development time, are becoming simpler to build and deploy. BEA's consulting offering includes a questionnaire meant to help companies put together a plan toward building a services oriented architecture over time. Compared with rival IBM, BEA does not have a large consulting services organization. Its strategy is to have one or two high-level system designers, or architects, from BEA work directly with clients, said Bruce Graham, vice president of worldwide services at BEA. Rather than have its engineers write the code to complete a customer engagement, BEA partners with systems integrators, such as Accenture, he said.