If it is true, as Finns insist, that Santa Claus lives in Finland and not Greenland, Denmark, Norway, or anywhere else, then he will get some help with processing his mail this year from BEA.

BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 "offers Finland Post a single, unified, easy-to-use platform for application development, integration, deployment, and management," said Oula Maijala, Country Manager, BEA Finland, as Finland's national mail carrier opted to standardize its electronic services development on the 8.1 platform.

"With the unified BEA platform, Finland Post can offer its partners and customers advanced Internet services designed to help reduce the complexity and costs of portal administration, development, and integration," Maijala added.

Finland Post currently runs several customized portals which require an extensive amount of specified expert knowledge. During the initial rollout of the BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, Finland Post plans to utilize BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1, running on the Intel platform, to build a partner portal for sub post offices. The company also plans to build online shopping services and external interfaces to the portal for partners. In addition, Finland Post plans to build customer reporting solutions in order to improve customer relations and supply chain management.

"BEA offered us a technology platform that is designed to map to and adapt to our changing business requirements. The new portal services and solutions can help us meet today's ever-increasing business challenges. The utilization of Internet services and external interfaces are becoming more and more important to our customers and partners," said Jukka Tiainen, Director, Finland Post.

"BEA's objective is to help companies become service-driven enterprises with increased technological responsiveness, adaptability and productivity. BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 can provide a seamless infrastructure for both integration specialists and application developers," said BEA's Maijala.