BEA Systems has announced the winners of its Liquid Portal awards at a pre-BEAWorld conference ceremony. Cypress Semiconductor, Sony Pictures Entertainment and New Zealand’s University of Waikato were recognized for their collaborative portals connecting IT systems and business process. Portal technology continues to be a delivery vehicle for a new generation of composite applications in a marketplace driven by Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). According to Gartner, a combination of suite and stand-alone product acquisitions fueled the horizontal portal product market to more than $780 million in 2005.

“We are excited to award the following BEA customers, Cypress Semiconductor, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the University of Waikato, with the BEA Liquid Portal award as these deployments represent the critical role portals are taking in an enterprise’s SOA strategy,” said Mark Carges, executive vice president at BEA Systems, Inc. “Our customers indicate that a key benefit of BEA’s portal solution is that it can develop and deploy Web applications on our open framework. They understand that by integrating user needs, IT systems and business processes via the portal, they have taken the first steps in delivering a SOA.”

Cypress Semiconductor

Cypress is using BEA AquaLogic User Interaction as the main platform for its corporate Web site, www.cypress.com, and for its internal sales and marketing department. The Cypress.com Web site receives about 150,000 visits per month and approximately 60 percent of the traffic comes from the “Design Resources” community, where customers can download software, application notes, datasheets and other product support information. Many Cypress customers choose to sign up for updates and other information from this section, populating a customer database which is also located on the portal.

Additionally, the sales and marketing team at Cypress uses the portal as a one-stop shop for internal information and interaction. The portal provides easier access to product information along with important sales tools, which has increased collaboration among teams and helping improve overall employee productivity and efficiency.

Sony Pictures Entertainment– mySPT

Sony Pictures Television (SPT), a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, is an independent program production and distribution company. The “mySPT” portal, powered by BEA WebLogic Portal, is designed to help SPT’s marketing organization reduce costs while helping the sales organizations be as competitive as possible.

As an information hub, the portal has helped allow SPT to Web-enable and integrate all key sales, finance and distribution processes. From a technical perspective, the portal is designed to help SPT establish a common application platform with a centralized data architecture where SPT can broadcast content, customer, marketing and sales information and be retrieved throughout a product’s lifecycle from program production to distribution.