BEA Aqualogic addressing Enterprise Mashup Space with New Products

I have been following the Enterprise mashup space for a bit and have a lot interest in tools that enable users to create Enterprise mashup applications much like they are able to do in the consumer space. Via the programmableweb blog i read a post about BEA's newest AquaLogic tools that are incorporating social computing tools that include Pages, a tool for lightweight web page creation, Ensemble, infrastructure software for mashup applications, and Pathways, an information discovery tool that combines social bookmarking and tagging with search and activity analytics.

They are branding the new services as Enterprise Social Computing and ask questions that i ask all the time which are - ...doesn't it seem like things are easier outside the firewall? Why isn't booking corporate travel as easy as reserving a table at your favorite local restaurant? Why isn't sharing all the information related to a project as simple as organizing your life on a MySpace (ok i might use Facebook) page? And why are email and Microsoft Office used for just about everything?

The Scobleshow also did a video back in June that i embed below with Jay Simons, Senior Director Product Marketing at BEA Systems that provides a good overview of the Pages tool and in which Simons talks about giving enterprise users in the lines of business tools that they are used to in the consumer space in order for them to create business applications with both internal and external data.

BEA has been in the web services creation business for a while with their products that enable developers to create web services that can be consumed by applications and therefore they understand some of the data issues of enterprise content, security and compliance which is extremely important when dealing with enterprise content distribution models. According to Simons these issues are part of the core of the product suite using existing standards which may address concerns that enterprises may have.

The Pages application seems to be a bit more 'end-user' friendly then some of the other enterprise mashup products that i have seen which tend to be more 'developer/techie' focused. and i love some of the examples that are provided in the video of enterprise applications that can basically be built on the fly by users (as long as the data sources are available of course).

I see a lot of uses for products like Pages and i would love to be able to get my hands on these tools to try it out- unfortunately it looks like it is only available for clients that already have BEA solutions in house. If you are a client of mine that has access to these new solutions, please drop me a line- i would love to talk to you about them!