BEA, HP, Oracle join NEC banking alliance

NEC has announced a new alliance called the Global Banking System, and that BEA Systems Hewlett-Packard and Oracle will be joining up to co-develop, market and support an application suite for the Japanese banking industry.

NEC, based in Tokyo, already is developing the core of the system, a Unix-based payment system called BankingWeb21. The product, which is part of NEC's IntegratedFinancialSolutions, will ship in April 2000, according to the company's statement.

Oracles database technology will be employed in the system, and BEA's middleware will be the glue between the user interface, the database and the coding. The system will be tuned to run on HP's hardware.

The new application suite will be targeted at Japanese banks considering migrating from the mainframe-based proprietary system, and virtually all Japanese banks are presently mainframe-based, according to a joint written statement from BEA and NEC.

So far no decision has been made for marketing the products outside of Japan, according to spokesmen from Oracle and HP.