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This week I had the chance to travel to Barcelona, as a booth bunny at EPAM's stand in the Exhibitors area at BEAWorld.

I've been to a San Francisco BEAWorld as well as the one two years ago in London. This one seemed to be smaller in scope and especially the number of exhibitors and partners was significantly less. I guess the Enterprise space has been consolidating and shrinking in the last few years.

Obviously BEA is buying many of the companies building products and extensions on top of its platforms, like the recent acquisitions around portals (Plumtree), BPM(Fuego), commerce, Voip, etc. The other big vendors (Oracle, SUN, IBM) are also buying up some of the smaller players, which is probably a good thing, a sign of a maturing industry. It does however make a more boring and smaller ecosystem around BEA.

While mostly I was focusing on talking to visitors, I had some time to sneak into some of the keynotes and presentation sessions throughout the conference.

The opening speech by CEO Alfred Cheung I thought was on par with the previous ones. He's a well-trained, competent but unexciting speaker in my opinion. The only thing that caught my attention was his quite tough rally against enterprise software package solutions, and how these don't fit the current business environment of rapid change and agility. It makes sense to be aggressive and fight back, as these package vendors (SAP, Oracle, Siebel, etc.) are moving more and more agressively into the platform space, positioning their own portal and BPM platforms, even Java EE containers and SOA frameworks against pure-play platform vendors like BEA. It's smart to acknowledge this and fight back by relying on a promise of a flexible, adaptable, agile platform.

The other keynote I was really interested in was by Paul Patrick, Chief Architect of BEA Systems.

He's BEA's chief "SOA guy", coming from the AquaLogic product line into the Chief Architect position. He has an interesting podcast series at InfoWorld (albeit the reading-from-paper type). On his keynote, it was fascinating to listen to the overall architectural strategy, and I've learned concepts I'm sure I'll be able to use in various sales situations. I liked the analogy of "neighborhoods" for distinct logical subsystems in an enterprise, formed around corporate divisions or newly acquired subsidiaries with separate needs and IT infrastructure. BEA's vision on how to serve these loosely coupled enterprise neighborhoods through a "service fabric" sounds fascinating and tantalizing for large enterprises.

My biggest worry is BEA's insistence on providing simplicity through more and more complex product suites and frameworks. It's great that they realize the need to provide a simpler development and runtime platform for Enterprise SOA development. But layering more and more complex products and frameworks (especially through acquisitions of disparate product suites) creates a new landslide of complexity both in terms of development and deployment. The current "Project Genesis" vision looks extremely appealing, and the ability to quickly and painlessly assemble and deploy new services makes a fantastic sales demo, but I'm not sure if this complex assembly of ESB, BPM, Portal, Security, "Web 2.0" products will just blend in this seamlessly.

BEA does have the engineering capabilities to provide a seamless integrated experience for complex problems, WebLogic Workshop 8.1 did prove me that a good few years ago. I have a good opinion on most of the individual products the new strategy will be built on. BEA's biggest challenge will be to take these different products, make their management, development, deployment interfaces as similar as possible, and to simplify aggressively, even at the cost of losing features. Perhaps moving these products to the new, more lightweight OSGi-based Server core will be the strategy to achieve this.