SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 2, 2006 -- BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS), a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced that an increasing proportion of European organizations are considering enterprise portals as a strategic business enabling technology, as they strive for further efficiency gains. According to a BEA survey, conducted among more than 600 respondents in 13 European countries, half of organizations (56 percent) either currently use or intend to deploy an enterprise portal within the next 12 months. The main business driver for implementing an enterprise portal is reduced cost: either through improved business processes (cited by 35 percent of respondents), customer self-service (cited by 24 percent) and/or improved collaboration (cited by 26 percent).

The survey finds that the greatest challenges to successfully deploying collaborative portals are organizational change management (cited 43 percent of respondents) and integration complexity (cited by 33 percent).

These findings were complimentary to the State of the Portal Market 2006 white paper that BEA published earlier this year, which includes a synthesis of new original survey results and recent analyst research on the portal market and is available at http://www.bea.com/whitepapers.

Almost half of all respondents (45 percent) said that SOA is critical to a portal environment. Portals are sometimes described as the 'face of SOA' because they help deliver the benefits of a Service-Oriented Architecture directly to the user community. The constituent parts of a SOA consist mostly of infrastructure technologies such as an enterprise service bus, service registry and orchestration, and service management and security.

"Many IT organizations are subscribing to the benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the model for re-factoring their infrastructures to lower development costs, increase return on investment (ROI) on existing assets, improve responsiveness to business requirements and optimize processes," says Martin Percival, EMEA Senior Technology Evangelist, BEA Systems. "As this survey concludes, the underlying structure of portals and composite applications are a pragmatic and tangible approach to an SOA strategy. Portals leverage common SOA concepts, for example, exposing Web services through portlets as building blocks to access back-end applications. Portals fundamentally provide a practical way to reveal the value of SOA to the business without making significant investments in other technologies."

It is also clear from the survey that the implementation of enterprise portals is being driven at a senior executive level -- among individuals who recognize the value of portals and want to maintain control over the way they are designed, developed and deployed. Almost half (45 percent) of respondents said that the CEO, CTO, or Board of Directors has the most influence on the portal solution being deployed across the organization. This is followed by the 'engineering' or 'technical upper management' (17 percent), 'lines of business' (12 percent) and the 'development team' (eight percent).

The BEA Enterprise Portals survey was conducted over a period of three months (July-September 2006) among 601 respondents. The countries participating in the survey were Belgium, Denmark, Eire, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

To learn more about BEA Portal Solutions visit http://www.bea.com/portal.

About BEA Systems, Inc.

BEA Systems, Inc. is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA's SOA 360 platform is the industry's most unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization, in order to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to achieve Business LiquidITy(TM) can be found at bea.com.

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