According to BEA country manager Srikant S Rao, the company is offering a whopping $40 billion market to Indian software companies for servicing and implementing its products to clients around the world. He hoped that Indian companies will take advantage of the opportunities by building the necessary capabilities.

BEA has major products like Tudedo, for distributed transaction management software; WebLogic, a family of component-based application server for Web and e-business; and eLink, a solution for integrating enterprise applications. "All these are designed for flexibility, ease of use and low cost of ownership," Rao claimed.

He said BEA has tied up with a few major companies, who in turn, have set up facilities to provide training, consultancy and implementation expertise to their staff. The partners will also help BEA in application integration and providing support to services related to its products. "We in talks with a number of systems integrators and IT consultants to address middleware framework requirements for enterprise customers," Rao said.

The company had revenues worth $289 million last year and has targeted a turnover of $1 billion by 2002. "Last quarter has been highly eventful for the company as it earned around $100 million during this period alone," he said.

In India, the strategy is to target financial sector companies, stock exchanges, consumer good sector, banking and government agencies for its products. Rao said that BEA's eLink gains importance in India as this family of products can provide customers with solutions to build, deploy, manage and integrate most important enterprise applications. "WebLogic is another product of significance, which can provide maximum flexibility in component-based application development, deployment and management," he said.

The middleware assumes significance in today's Web-enabled world as it is important for different systems at back-end such as legacy applications to talk to internet-based applications at the front-end. The middleware provides a unified infrastructure for distributed mission critical applications across the internet, client/server and legacy systems and enables inter-operability across these platforms.

BEA provides solutions in major middleware platforms like Com of Microsoft, Corba, belonging to a consortium of industry leaders and Enterprise Java Beans from Sun Microsystems.