BEA Income, Revenue Drop in Q4

BEA Systems Inc. saw its net income in the fourth quarter drop more than $8.5 million over the same time last year.

Net income fell from $19 million in Q4 2001 to $10.6 million in the quarter that ended Jan. 31. At the same time, revenues for the San Jose, Calif., fell from $256 million in Q4 2001 to $231.3 million this past quarter.

Still, BEA officials, in a conference call Thursday, said there was reason for optimism for the upcoming months. Fourth-quarter revenues were up from $220 million in Q3, and the company closed 18 deals of more than $1 million each in the quarter.

Also, BEAs expense-cutting program, including 350 layoffs since its third-quarter earnings call, has brought expenses in line with current production, and Chief Financial Officer Bill Klein said he expects BEAs first quarter of fiscal 2003 “to be in the range of $220 million to $225 million, with pro forma profit of 13 to 14 percent of revenue.”

BEA “exits fiscal 02 in excellent shape,” said President and CEO Alfred Chuang said. The company will hold its annual developer conference next week in San Diego and is expected to announce several new products and strategic directions.

One such new technology will be a visual Java development environment based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform that will make building Java applications easier for developers. BEA is hoping to substantially increase its developer ranks with the release of the technology, codenamed Cajun.

Chuang said Cajun will enter beta on Monday at the start of BEAs conference and he said he expects many of the companys more than 300,000 developers to participate in the beta testing. A production version will be available “some time in the spring,” he said.

Chuang hinted at some of the other news expected from the companys conference next week, saying the companys application server continues to converge with the BEA integration server technology. “It doesnt end there,” he said. “Its about the entire system platform and entire enterprise structure.”