Laurence Cole, managing director of BEA Australia and New Zealand, talks to ZDNet Australia about the challenges of maintaining growth in a difficult market.
T&B: In the US, BEA has been noted recently for setting up services/alliance partnerships with the likes of PwC Consulting, KPMG Consulting, and Deloitte Consulting. Do these partnerships extend to the Australian market? Are there other purely local partnerships that BEA Australia has established?
Cole: BEA has global partnerships with the organisations you have mentioned and this obviously includes Australia. Over the past 12 months our key focus has been developing our channel business. We have a very active local partner team, which enhances existing global alliances and develops local partnerships with organisations like Adaptive International, Hubbub, EGlobal, EServe, and Cortex e-Business, to name a few. We have also continued to develop our ISV community and work closely with Peace Software, Mincom, QValent, Tower Technology, Prophecy, and Staffware. The success of these initiatives is reflected in our growth during the year.
In Australia, what percentage of BEA's revenues is expected to come from partnerships?
Over the past 12 months our business has evolved considerably from a primarily direct sales model and as mentioned we have made a significant investment in the development of our channel program. This will be reflected in the revenue contribution from our partner program, which we expect will increase by over 120 percent on the previous year to account for nearly 50 percent of total ANZ revenue.
What share of the application server market does BEA hold in Australia? Is this share growing or shrinking?
There are a number of independent sources with varying and conflicting figures on this subject. A recent Gartner study indicated that BEA Systems enjoyed a 34 percent market share compared to 31 percent for IBM. I understand a recent Giga study indicated that BEA and IBM have an equal share with approximately 34 percent share of the market. We believe that BEA in Australia and New Zealand has a dominant share of the application server market and that we will continue to grow that market share.
We are also looking to expand our presence in the application infrastructure space through the release of BEA WebLogic Platform 7.0 which is built on WebLogic Server. WebLogic Platform 7.0 unifies, simplifies, and extends enterprise application development and integration, and provides a common platform to easily build and deploy Web services. WebLogic Platform 7.0 combines integration, portal, and application development and deployment capabilities.
Has the dot-com crash slowed the demand for application servers? What lessons has the company learned from the dot-com era?
To be honest the dot-com crash has not had a significant impact on the business or direction we are taking in Australia. We are involved in major organisations across the region and across all industries and thus we continue to see strong demand for application servers in all sectors.
What has changed is that enterprises are looking very closely at their current infrastructure and how to improve the way they do business and to improve the productivity of existing systems. For example BEA recently worked with Essential Software to develop a specialised call centre for one of the major Australian state-owned energy suppliers. This solution, based on BEA WebLogic Server, has enabled the provision of fast and accurate pricing information, which is critical for the newly deregulated NSW energy industry.
BEA can provide a complete infrastructure solution that will not only help achieve new streams of growth but also help to reduce costs. The solutions that we provide are not just about e-commerce or e-business, they are fundamental to the way organisations operate.
