No doubt about it - the word of the year in the IT industry is "virtualisation."

I thought I might escape it at media and analysts' conference run by enterprise infrastructure software company BEA System in sunny Bali last week, but I was mistaken.

And I was glad to have a handle on an innovative use of this new technology.

Heck, if a technology is new, any use of it is bound to be innovative.

But as BEA vice-president for engineering Guy Churchward insisted, virtualisation isn't that new - it's been around in the mainframe world since the 1960s.

Whatever - it's new-ish to this century, where mainframes no longer rule the earth, and US company VMware opened up the market so convincingly with its work in the late 1990s that eventually even the chip makers wanted to join in.

BEA's angle on virtualisation is a little special, but more of that in the story below.

First, the main function of an analyst and media conference, or what the marketing department considers the main function.

That, of course, would be reporting on the triumphs of the marketing department.

Me, cynical? Only because I'm sure I heard one of the marketing guys refer to us, his audience, near the end of his presentation, as "team," which either means he regards us as collectively in cahoots with BEA or (more likely) that he was recycling a presentation he'd already given to his salespeople.

Whatever; if we must talk about money, general manager Asia Pacific Steve Au Yeung's summary was pretty crisp: BEA is doing pretty well, thanks, with total revenue for its 2007 fiscal year hitting $US1.4 billion, an increase of 17%.

$US829 million of that came from services revenue, an increase of 20% and a validation of the company's Service Oriented Architecture.

BEA takes its SOA so seriously it doesn't bother to translate the TLA the first time it uses it (three-letter acronym, but I'm sure you knew that), even though it hasn't always been its main bread-winner.

That would be Tuxedo, the hugely successful distributed transaction processing system that trundles along in the background running ATMs and other high-volume systems around the world.

Tuxedo is such a faithful old hound it scarcely deserves a mention - the action for BEA is all in the new stuff.

And not so much for us Australasians, sad to say, as the new realities of global production show their bite.

The big money for BEA is in China, India and Korea, so that's where it's turning its attention.

After 10 years in China, BEA has more than 1800 customers and 500 partners and the country is contributing more licence revenue than any other territory outside the US.

BEA is the leader in middleware in China, so of course has set up a research and development centre there.

It has also established R&D centres in India and Korea - India looks particularly promising as the fastest-growing customer in the region.

From our corner of the planet, we can but gape in awe.

 

Read the original, here.