Q&A: BEA's CEO Alfred Chuang on app development, integration

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- At its annual eWorld conference this week, BEA Systems Inc. detailed its plans to marry application development and integration in Version 8.1 of its WebLogic Platform, which includes its application, portal and integration server technology. BEA's CEO, Alfred Chuang, spoke with Computerworld about the company's direction. Part 2 of the interview will be published tomorrow.
How much is Web services a part of your integration strategy? It's a pretty small piece right now, because it's really only used for a little bit more internal communication. It's a technology that we have decided to use for building specific adapters that go into packaged applications. But other than that, if you look at process management, which is the biggest part of the [WebLogic] Integration technology, if you look at the rules engine, if you look at many of the critical conversion technologies in [WebLogic] Integration, those have nothing to do with Web services at all. So Web services are really used from an external or deep internal perspective only.
Do you think Web services will increase in importance? It will continue to increase because, ultimately, if that becomes a successful standard for everyone to [adhere] to for standardizing on how applications work together, it will slowly influence more and more of the internal applications, plus the adapters. Let's say this is PeopleSoft, Siebel or SAP adapting into talking to other types of systems. By the time they get to providing native Web services interfaces, then things will need one or two less levels of translation. It will only make things cleaner and better.
You have noted that application developers and integration specialists tend to fall into separate camps in IT organizations. You're trying to encourage convergence, but it seems to require a change in IT philosophy. How do you go about trying to promote that change? I think knowledge and proliferation are the two key things. ... People don't really have a developers' community. This is a pretty foreign concept. It's a very common concept for people that are doing Web pages, people who are doing graphics design. ... In the enterprise, practically nothing is shared. So I think that is critical.
The other thing is it's ultimately how you educate. Historically, we plan very large projects of two years, three years, a five-year project, very much [on the] waterfall-based [concept]. You disseminate a task, and hopefully [in] due time, you try to integrate the pieces, and that's how thick apps historically are built.
Nobody builds applications that way anymore.