Sun to Expand Java Enterprise System with SeeBeyond Buy (
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With its $387 million deal to acquire SeeBeyond Technology, Sun Microsystems says it will be able to offer the industry's most complete platform for the development, deployment and management of enterprise applications.SAN FRANCISCO—Sun Microsystems bolstered its position in the business integration market Tuesday with its agreement to acquire SeeBeyond Technology in a cash deal worth $387 million.
The deal will bring the SeeBeyond ICAN (Integrated Composite Application Network) Suite into the Sun Java Enterprise System suite as the sixth primary piece of the JES solution, which also features the Sun Java Application Platform Suite, the Sun Java Communication Suite, the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, the Sun Java Availability Suite, the Sun Java Web Infrastructure Suite, and now the Sun Java Integration Suite—which SeeBeyond will be referred to. Sun made the announcement Tuesday morning prior to the opening of the JavaOne conference here.
Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems Inc., said the acquisition of SeeBeyond Technology Corp. positions Sun with the industrys most complete platform for the development, deployment and management of enterprise applications.
"We now jump right to the front of the business integration market—with Solaris 10, with the Java Enterprise System stack, with all the identity management and directory and interoperability with Microsoft, with all the service-oriented architecture, and all the enterprise service bus capabilities built around JBI [Java Business Integration], and now SeeBeyond right on top of this," McNealy said.
Jim Demetriades, founder and chief executive of Monrovia, Calif.-based SeeBeyond, said, "This is the next logical step in addressing aggressively a huge market opportunity in the enterprise application development space." Demetriades said SeeBeyond is "the only completely organically developed integration offering available on the market."
Sun and SeeBeyond estimated the enterprise application development space to be an opportunity worth about $5 billion, and Jonathan Schwartz, Suns president and chief operating officer, said, "We plan on taking half of that."
Demetriades said that although SeeBeyond is smaller than some of its competitors such as Tibco Software Inc. and others, he described them as "band-aid companies" with "pieced-together solutions."
Click here to read about Sun outlining the next two versions of Java.
McNealy said the two companies are a good fit. "We looked around, we looked around hard, and we didnt see anything out there that had the capabilities ICAN 5 had. I believe the cultures are a natural fit—theyre a good left-coaster out here in California. I think we have really built an opportunity to go after the $5 billion enterprise application platform space."
Moreover, "We have a complete SOA story with this combination," McNealy said. "SeeBeyond developed on Solaris, they use NetBeans, and in August theyll be shipping ICAN 5.1, which will be able to deploy apps on the Sun application server, which we open-sourced yesterday."
In addition, the combination of Sun and SeeBeyond "allows you to preserve your investment in your legacy systems—you wrap them up and present them as reusable services and then build composite apps out of these distributed Web services."
Check out a slide show from the JavaOne 2005 show.
John Loiacono, Suns executive vice president of software, said this deal will complete the Java Enterprise System with the addition of a sixth suite. However, as Loiacono and others have said that Suns ultimate goal is to open-source all of the components of the JES stack, he said there was no time frame for when the ICAN technology might be open-sourced.
Demetriades called the deal "a brilliant move by Sun ... the combination is unstoppable."
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