NEW YORK-BEA Systems Inc., a major player in providing mission-critical middleware solutions, announced BEA M3, which it said is the first and only production-ready Object Transaction Manager.
Among other things, M3 will make it “easier for carriers who want to bundle services,” said Frederick A. Crary, vice president and general manager of worldwide vertical market sales for BEA, Sunnyvale, Calif. Crary said this is important for wireless carriers because their business model is based on raising the maximum revenue per subscriber. This is achieved by offering subscribers new services.
“For example, in Germany, companies like Deutsche Telekom and Tegaron collect nearly twice the dollars per subscriber compared with other wireless carriers by providing additional billable service. Tegaron uses wireless applications to inform and alert motorists of traffic delays or access to roadside services in the case of a breakdown using a standard GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) mobile phone. BEA software is the backbone of these applications,” explained Crary.
In a telecommunications environment, middleware is the software that connects the operations of the handset to a carrier’s legacy systems.
“The whole software paradigm is in transition from procedures to objects, and M3 is an object component, the next step in the evolution,” he said.
Procedures-based software is fast and effective but only at dealing with one, pre-set combination of facts and/or actions. By contrast, distributed component computing uses objects to encapsulate all data and characteristics of a piece of information into a single container-a phone number, for example, Crary said.
Once an object has been created, that packet of information can be reused across multiple applications. For example, a single object serving as a “bank account” and containing an individual’s credit and other financial information, can be used by telecommunications carriers, banks and other companies. Alternatively, the same bank account object can be tapped for a person subscribing to multiple types of telecommunications services provided by different carriers.
“The problem has been that, because objects contain so much information and are connection based, their performance has been slow,” he said.
“M3 optimizes object performance because it is not connection based. It just has one characteristic-a state.”
In this context, state means that the BEA M3 object can be preprogrammed with a cluster of parameters so that it can make intelligent decisions.
The release of BEA M3 culminates several years of development work. It also brings to a close BEA’s nine-month Early Adopter Program in which 20 corporations provided feedback on the product.
“System availability is a key measurement for Ameritech. Our goal is to have systems available seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” said Tim Terry, director of architecture for the Customer Solutions Group of Ameritech Corp., a participant in the early-adopter program.
Ameritech’s Customer Solutions Group plans to start deploying components of their BEA M3-based customer contact system by the end of the year. The application will support up to 6,000 concurrent users.
Designed and tested to run mission-critical applications on UNIX and Windows NT, BEA M3 is scheduled for worldwide availability by late July.
