NEWS BRIEFS

San Jose, CA and San Francisco– BEA Systems, Inc. (nasdaq: beas), one of the world’s leading e-business infrastructure software companies, and Popular Power, a leader in distributed computing, today revealed the force behind Popular Power’s massive distributed computing platform, announcing that BEA WebLogic(r) Server(tm) is the foundation for Popular Power’s internet-based computing system.

The first company to release distributed computing software of this magnitude for commercial use, Popular Power has designed a flexible software platform based on BEA WebLogic Server(tm) that takes large processing jobs and distributes them in smaller batches across vast numbers of pcs owned by organizations and individuals — utilizing the otherwise untapped processing power of idle cpu-cycles and bandwidth to complete each computational task. the data is then sent back to bea weblogic server and is then aggregated and analyzed.

Anyone with an Internet connection can participate by downloading Popular Power software from http://www.popularpower.com . The software client activates when a member’s computer is idle. It then contacts Popular Power’s central BEA WebLogic Server hub and is sent a small part of a larger processing or network job. Each of the participating computers executes its task and then returns the results to the centralized server for aggregation and analysis. Popular Power’s platform can be spread across hundreds of thousands of computers connected over the Internet to provide data analysis and other computing capabilities that far exceed that of a single mainframe or supercomputer, including the largest UNIX servers.

This computing structure is exceptionally well-suited for businesses and scientists with projects requiring intensive data analysis. One prime example is Popular Power’s first non-profit research project that uses a computer model of the human immune system to help better understand and improve influenza vaccines. Using simulations that run on participating computers, the model is “injected” with different vaccines in order to test their efficacy against various strains of the flu. The goal of the project is to help develop better strategies for selecting the influenza vaccine, which must change every year as the influenza virus mutates. Since the project launched in April 2000, thousands of participating PCs have completed more than eight million tasks, which translates to hundreds of years of computing time already donated to the effort. The research is being conducted in conjunction with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization scientists responsible for selecting each year’s influenza vaccine.

“After exploring a number of options, Popular Power determined that BEA WebLogic was the only platform able to deliver mission-critical applications such as drug testing, financial modeling, or network performance testing at the level of service we require,” said Marc Hedlund, CEO and co-founder of Popular Power. “Our business depends on an ongoing, automated conversation between participant machines and the server, so finding the most reliable and scalable application server was paramount.”

“The Popular Power team has proven its ability to execute on a bold plan, essentially to build one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms on the Internet that gives companies and research organizations access to massive processing resources,” said Alfred Chuang, founder, president and chief operations officer of BEA Systems, Inc. “A key system requirement for Popular Power was scalability. The company is creating a network that must be able to grow to support millions of participants, producing processing loads that BEA WebLogic Server was designed from the ground up to support.”

About Popular Power

Headquartered in San Francisco, Popular Power ( http://www.popularpower.com ) launched the first commercial distributed computing software in April 2000. By aggregating unused computing resources, Popular Power delivers a new generation of network applications enabled by distributed architecture, as well as cost-effective solutions for the high-performance computer processing market. Sample network applications include load testing, web content indexing and conversion, network mapping, and distributed database services. Computing applications well suited to the system are those where CPU can be a bottleneck, such as financial modeling, drug design and graphics rendering.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. is one of the world’s leading e-business infrastructure software companies, with over 8,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. BEA and its WebLogic(r) brand are among the most trusted names in e-business. Businesses built on the award-winning BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform(tm) are reliable, highly scalable, and poised to bring new services to market quickly. BEA’s e-business platform is the de facto standard for over 1,200 systems integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs) and application service providers (ASPs) to provide complete solutions that fast-track and future-proof e-businesses for high growth and profitability. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., BEA has 90 offices in 30 countries and is on the Web at http://www.bea.com .

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