(May 2, 2002) - BEA Systems, Inc. and Research In Motion Limited (RIM) have forged a strategic relationship to deliver a framework that eases the development and delivery of mobile enterprise Web services applications for the thousands of organizations using BlackBerry^TM.

BEA and RIM plan to jointly deliver a simple and flexible framework for developing and deploying mobile Web services on the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform^TM. The goal is to bring BEA's integrated development framework, BEA WebLogic Workshop^TM, and the unique characteristics of BlackBerry together in a single solution to support an always-on, push-based architecture with end-to-end security and back-end integration to corporate systems. The framework is intended to extend the power of Web services application development to provide independent software vendors (ISVs) and in-house corporate developers with a powerful solution for mobilizing enterprise Web services.

The purpose is to combine BEA WebLogic Workshop and BlackBerry to enable enterprise and application developers to work on the same code base and collaborate on the same development projects - standardizing on a single, unified architecture. BEA and RIM plan to help enable IT organizations to increase operational efficiency and boost developer productivity.

"BEA is the first vendor to bring the power of J2EE and Web services to developers at virtually all levels with the ease-of-use and support for open standards that BEA WebLogic Workshop delivers," said Adam Bosworth, vice president of engineering, BEA Systems. "With this relationship, our goal is to enable enterprises to integrate all their applications on top of a unified, simplified, extensible - and mobile - application infrastructure platform."

For more information, visit www.blackberry.net.