BEA Intros Object Transaction Server

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June 03, 1998 (1:30 PM EDT)

By Jeff Sweat,

Transaction-processing vendor BEA Systems took the wraps Wednesday off BEA M3, a middleware product that will help IT organizations use objects on an enterprise level to speed application deployment time.

The company said objects, despite their benefits, have not been widely used in applications that power the enterprise because there has not been a solid object infrastructure to handle the transactions. Many object servers have handled only 10 to 20 transactions per second, but M3, an "object transaction server" formerly known as Project Iceberg, handles up to 1,000 transactions per second -- the speed of many traditional transaction servers, said BEA president and CEO Bill Coleman. "We've broken the bottleneck," he said.

M3, which stands for third-generation middleware, essentially combines the transaction server structure of BEA's Tuxedo, with the ability to interpret objects. BEA is not alone in its efforts to form such hybrid object transaction servers; IBM and Microsoft are working on similar products. "I personally believe that this movement ... is to get [IT groups] out of the business of handcrafting software and move on to assembling applications," Coleman said.

By being able to craft enterprise-class applications out of reusable components, rather than starting from scratch each time, Coleman says, organizations will be able to complete large-scale deployments faster. "The real promise ultimately is to get [organizations] out of this multiyear development cycle," he said.

More than 20 vendors have lined up behind M3, backing BEA's efforts to cast M3 as an object transaction development platform. Among the companies planning to support the transaction server are Rational, Symantec, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Sequent, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, PeopleSoft, and Informix.

M3 is scheduled for general availability on July 24. BEA announced Enterprise JavaBean components for M3, which will emerge in beta in the fall, along with a new builder tool, code-named Ice Crystal.