BEA Systems, a world leader in infrastructure software, today announced that Sun Chemical,  the world's foremost manufacturer of printing inks, is implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on BEA WebLogic Server 8.1, BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 and BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1, to support numerous enterprise business processes including enterprise application integration (EAI) and customer relationship management (CRM).

Sun Chemical saw an opportunity to help improve its operational efficiency and competitive position by employing an integration architecture and SOA to help unify a sprawling infrastructure that included many standalone applications and silos of data. BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 supports an integration hub connecting numerous enterprise systems, which include Cognos, Ariba, Epiphany as well as AS/400s. Rather than building links between every data source and application, business processes flow through the integration hub, which helps to enable the orchestration of application interactions. This business processes flow also utilizes BEA to support a reliable messaging layer and optimize infrastructure performance. BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 was selected for application development and creation of Web services.

New applications taking advantage of a BEA-supported SOA strategy at Sun Chemical include an electronic-invoicing system and an order-tracking solution. The invoicing system is designed to help one of Sun Chemical's divisions streamline its billing processes by helping to eliminate the time and cost associated with manually processing invoice information. Order tracking can allow customers to check the status of orders from initial placement through delivery.

"These two applications are examples of the SOA really helping to put value back into the business," said James Houghton, IT director at Sun Chemical. "We're now able to build composite applications by combining functionality from multiple systems into new solutions. These are projects that would have been more complex and time-consuming before we moved to SOA and BEA. In fact, we were previously unable to cost-justify integration projects of this nature. But now, we're doing them."

Sun Chemical considered a number of platforms for its SOA, including IBM WebSphere, before selecting BEA. The decision hinged on several factors. The company was impressed with how BEA adheres to current and emerging standards, which Sun Chemical believes can maximize the infrastructure's lifecycle. Also, the scalability and clustering advantages that BEA can provide have been proven in demanding environments. Sun Chemical is replacing applications that currently run on Microsoft BizTalk and other application servers with applications that run on BEA WebLogic Server.

"Choosing BEA to build our SOA has already been a strategic win for us," said Houghton. "We are now able to design and build technical solutions to address cross-system business needs more efficiently than in the past. And we believe that we can do so with less risk , from both a technology and financial perspective."

"Sun Chemical is not only a world-leading manufacturer of printing inks and organic pigments," said Bill Roth, vice president of product marketing at BEA. "They are also clearly a leader in using the principles of SOA to deliver more responsive business systems. The fact that Sun Chemical is standardizing on BEA products can make it easier for them to operate a flexible, adaptive IT environment. They can run applications such as Epiphany on BEA and lower administrative costs at the same time."