BEA Continues Acquisition Quest

Despite five acquisitions in a little more than two months, BEA Systems Inc. is not done yet.

BEAs new chief technology officer, Rob Levy, said the San Jose, Calif., company will continue to seek opportunities to build out its infrastructure software platform through internal development or acquisition.

Levy said part of his plan is to "take the edge view of technology and move it more seamlessly to BEA, and do it as an incubation play, but also to bring a committee to decide whether to buy or build" technology.

In just over 60 days, BEA acquired Plumtree Software Inc., M7, ConnecTerra Inc., Compoze Software Inc. and SolarMetric Inc.

"We want to keep and extend the lead on thought leadership on service-oriented architecture," Levy said. "And I want to transform the office of the CTO to include both technology and business."

Meanwhile, Levy said that BEA is looking to take advantage of the increase in exposure and adoption of edge devices, such as sensors for RFID (radio-frequency identification), for example. And BEA is working on the convergence between edge devices and application servers, he said. "We made some initial forays into those areas," Levy said, noting BEAs acquisition of ConnecTerra, a Cambridge, Mass., RFID middleware provider and maker of enterprise infrastructure software for device computing.

"There will be more products coming along these lines," Levy added, referring to the area of convergence between edge devices and application servers.

Before joining BEA, Levy was chief technology strategist at CA.

BEAs acquisition in September of M7, an Eclipse-based development tools company in Cupertino, Calif., is designed to hasten delivery of BEAs developer tools on the Eclipse framework, the company said.

M7 plays into BEAs strategy of offering blended development using both open-source and proprietary software to create applications. M7 provides an IDE (integrated development environment) called NitroX that is based on Eclipse and supports open-source and commercial frameworks.

BEA tools could pave the way to SOA adoption. Click here to read more.

"As it stands at the moment, [BEAs] AquaLogic is mostly composed of upgraded ex-WebLogic-branded products," said Bola Rotibi, an analyst with Ovum Ltd., in London. "Three additional product lines have yet to come: the AquaLogic Composer, the AquaLogic Process build-time and run-time environments, and AquaLogic Portal. Newly acquired Plumtree is the obvious choice for the forthcoming AquaLogic Portal. AquaLogic Process and Composer are likely to come from further acquisitions that should be unveiled before the end of the year."

Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol Inc., in Somerville, Mass., said of BEAs SolarMetric purchase: "I think its a great move for BEA. With a full EJB 3 [Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0] implementation and mature ORM [object relational mapping] capabilities from SolarMetric, they have catapulted themselves right back into a leading technology position."

Recent BEA Acquisitions.

SolarMetric

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