Enterprise software vendor BEA Systems Inc. has teamed with management consultancy Accenture Ltd. to streamline the management and creation of Web portals for customers, employees and partners.
In an announcement this week, San Jose-based BEA and New York-based Accenture said they will package BEA's WebLogic Platform with Accenture's skills in Java-based Web services to create an "e-commerce and portal rationalization" offering aimed at helping large businesses manage their Web portals.
The new services will help businesses reduce the cost and time required to implement and maintain their portals and related infrastructure, according to the companies.
"Our clients are under pressure to streamline their IT organizations, reduce costs and redeploy limited resources to projects of greatest business benefits," John Stefanchik, a partner in Accenture's Technology Capability Group, said in a statement. "Accenture is teaming with BEA to provide a portal rationalization solution that can help to achieve these goals."
Robert Duffner, senior director of BEA WebLogic Portal, said in a statement that the new offering aims to help businesses better manage their portals so they can focus on other projects.
"The BEA mission is to drive that complexity out of the enterprise," he said. "Our relationship with Accenture supplies a deep understanding of alignment between IT strategy and business goals."
Nathaniel Palmer, an analyst with Delphi Group in Boston, said the WebLogic partnership between BEA and Accenture "reflects a couple of things that are going on in the space," including a "strategic leverage point in the WebLogic infrastructure stack versus (IBM's) WebSphere." WebLogic has rich technology with good integration, he said, making it a "counterpart to what IBM is really pushing today."
For BEA, bringing in Accenture will give it a services component it has never really had, Palmer said. "BEA has traditionally not been a services company — they've sold to developers and architects," he said. "That's very different than IBM's strategy of (software) wrapped in services. What this does is make WebLogic and Accenture more competitive" against IBM's WebSphere. "It's a good thing for the space as well."
