Siebel, BEA team up on Web standards

Siebel Systems and BEA Systems are investing more than $1 million in a joint effort to develop and market e-business standards, the two software companies said Monday.

Under the agreement, the companies plan to incorporate into their products a number of new e-business specifications based on Web services and the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

"Web services" is the label given to a new way of developing e-business programs so that they're interoperable with other e-business software setups, and can easily swap data via the Net. Though the approach is espoused by major technology companies, most businesses are either still investigating Web services or are just beginning to use such software to link different in-house systems behind their own firewalls.

The idea of the partnership is to enable Siebel's set of customer service software to exchange data with other business systems without a lot of expensive consulting work, the companies said.

Siebel and BEA have already worked together for several years to make their software compatible. As a result, BEA's WebLogic product is one of several third-party software programs that Siebel supports as a component of its Universal Application Network, a new set of applications designed to make Siebel products more interoperable with other software setups. San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel also supports competing products from IBM and Microsoft.