Adobe Systems Inc. hopes to drive faster enterprise adoption rates of rich Internet applications (RIAs) by forming an enterprise partnership with BEA Systems, Inc., where BEA has agreed to bundle its Workshop Studio with Adobe Flex Builder 2 and BEA WebLogic Server with Adobe LiveCycle products.
The new bundled products from both San Jose, Calif.-based businesses, give users the ability to build RIAs that can also support service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies. The integration of Adobe Flex Builder and BEA Workshop Studio enables developers to build interactive and feature-laden applications.
Phil Costa, director of product management at Adobe, said Adobe’s work with BEA is a strategic one because the company hopes to leverage off the partnership to help spread Adobe Flex Builder technology within the enterprise market space.
“One of our major objectives with our Flex product line and technology is to raise enterprise adoption of RIA,” Costa said. “We took the opportunity to partner with a company that’s also a major technology player in this space to help drive Flex technology. Our partnership with BEA helps drive home the message that Flex is a great technology for developers to use.”
On the BEA side of things, Bill Roth, vice-president of Workshop products at BEA, notes that with the recent partnership between the two companies, an entire enterprise’s computing experience can be improved.
“Adobe focuses more on the high-end design and presentation of things and they tend to have a very particular type of customer,” Roth said. “With BEA, our channel is a mix of hard-core developers, and infrastructure and back-end folks, so there’s not really any overlap in the channel and with these products.”
Both Costa and Roth maintain that the new bundled products significantly lower a customer’s overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Costa mentions instead of having to purchase and install two separate products, customers only need to buy one bundled product, and can still receive the same advantages of what used to come separately from both products.
“We’ll be distributing both directly and through our channel partners,” Roth said. “We’ll also be doing a lot of cross-training with Adobe for our partners. We train the sales channel and we make sure slides, Web casts and product managers are available to our reseller community as well. Our corporate-wide goal is to be serious about making our reseller channel successful.”
Roth also advises resellers to not just sell these new bundled products alone, but instead to also sell them with products and services. Furthermore, Costa says the channel community can also drive higher margins and profits by not just focusing on the transactional element of the sale, but instead, focusing on adding value around the technology being deployed to their customers.
“Having a differentiating set of expertise, whether it’s vertical knowledge or design expertise to build applications,” Costa said, “these are the skills that will drive our partners to their success.”
Alain Courville, vice-president of marketing and client relations at CMTek, a Montreal, Que.-based technology integration, business consulting and audit service company, and also a BEA partner, thinks the recently announced partnership will have a positive effect on his company.
“We’re just a BEA partner at the moment, but this partnership could entice us to also partner with Adobe now,” Courville said. “As the Internet gets richer and richer, enhanced applications are more in demand with our customers. Thanks to these new products, [CMTek] can now come to the table with a better financial model and bundled solution for our customers.”
Costa says Adobe is using this partnership to also help build up its channel community by letting partners see the opportunity and value in being able to offer services on top of products to their customers.
“We’re looking to partner with established companies that have complimentary technologies to allow our customers to take advantage of RIAs,” Costa said.
Roth says these products are a global roll-out for both companies in both the North American and Asia-Pacific regions.
“I’m excited to see the BEA developer community work with the Adobe community to see what kind of synergies we can get from this partnership and bundled products,” Roth said.
