BEA Systems has unveiled BEA Guardian Support Service, the industry’s first and only patent-pending predictive and pre-emptive software support. Guardian represents a radical departure from the traditional break-fix support model employed by the enterprise software industry and is designed to potentially eliminate the burden of reactive and proactive support services, as per the company. 

BEA plans to offer Guardian as a premium support option for WebLogic and select AquaLogic products. Like WebLogic Server, which is designed for mission critical applications and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Guardian is designed to ensure peace of mind at the data center and with IT executives. Together, Guardian and WebLogic Server can provide a rock-solid foundation for building out SOA environments.

“Our customers are running their most mission critical applications on BEA technology and need a system like Guardian that is designed to provide 24 by seven, pre-emptive automated support, and will vigilantly and constantly scan for potential problems before they occur,” said Terry Clearkin, senior vice president, Worldwide Support Services at BEA. “Guardian Signature Patterns™ are designed to tap a vast pool of the best engineering talent, and to make that knowledge available in real-time to BEA customers. We believe customers implementing this technology will see significant reductions in the time and effort they invest in maintaining systems, and will be able to do it proactively. Finally, organizations adopting SOA need a strong foundation to build from and we believe that Guardian will play an important role from a support perspective.”

Guardian is an integrated and automated maintenance tool that can help streamline deployments and day-to-day operations. It scans, analyzes and diagnoses domains for potential problems, and recommends and finds the right updates and maintenance packs to correct the problem. By correcting problems before they occur, customers can potentially eliminate unplanned downtime, reduce IT support staff hours and minimize the impact to operations and end-users through the application of Signature PatternsTM/SM.

Guardian is a key services offering that is part of the BEA SOA 360º platform. Announced today at BEAWorld 2006, the BEA SOA 360º platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic, Tuxedo and the company’s newest product initiative, BEA Workspace 360º.

BEA Guardian uses a vast reference library of Signature Patterns to monitor systems 24 by seven. These patterns are developed from a community of engineering knowledge and industry wide support environments. Signature Patterns describe a set of parameters, thresholds, settings, coding practices and/or symptoms and their interdependencies. Additionally, Signature Patterns include a series of steps for resolution and are continually updated so that Guardian can identify potential conflicts or trouble areas.
In addition, Guardian is designed to proactively recommend software updates that can fine-tune and optimize the production environment for efficiency and quality assurance. Guardian is also designed to help IT professionals roll-out complex deployments smoothly and on time, as well as protect customers’ investments in WebLogic Server, the industry’s leading application server platform.

BEA Guardian Pre-Emptive Support Service will be released in December 2006, and pricing information will be available at that time. Guardian is being unveiled at BEAWorld 2006 in San Francisco. For more information about Guardian, visit.bea.com/services.