Forrester has named BEA an enterprise service bus market leader in its recent report entitled, “The Enterprise Service Bus: The Forrester Wave Product Evaluation, Q2 2006.”

BEA was named a leader in the enterprise service bus (ESB) space. Forrester defines an ESB as "an intermediary that makes a set of reusable business services widely available."

According to the report, “the total value of the BEA solution is most compelling when the customer uses multiple BEA products to provide a complete SOA environment. Organizations seeking high-end ESBs will find the combination of ALSB and WLI to be a powerful, yet flexible, alternative for supporting their efforts to implement SOA — even where other platforms also need to be accommodated.”

AquaLogic Service Bus, BEA’s offering in the ESB product category, is part of the AquaLogic product family and plays an important role in the company’s service infrastructure market strategy. This strategy is designed to deliver a complete SOA platform that helps enable business transformation and optimization, while helping organizations reduce their cost structures and grow new revenue streams. (BEA's service infrastructure strategy was announced on June 9, 2005, along with the company's Think Liquid vision and AquaLogic product line.)

Forrester investigated the enterprise service bus offerings of eight vendors for this report. Forrester evaluated these products based on three criteria: product offering, vendor strategy and market presence.

BEA AquaLogic Service Bus is designed to offer intelligent messaging, routing and transformation that can support heterogeneous end-points, combined with capabilities for service registration, monitoring and lifecycle management. It can converge the integration capabilities of an enterprise service bus with operational service management in a single software product, helping to accelerate configuration and deployment and to simplify ongoing operations of shared services across the service-oriented architecture (SOA).

BEA AquaLogic Service Bus is also designed to deliver dynamic routing, protocol brokering and transformation, through a meta-data driven configuration environment that can help accommodate change by removing the management of services from the services themselves, thus creating an agile SOA infrastructure that can be responsive to changing business needs.