BEA Makes High-End, Low-End Moves

BEA Systems Inc. this week made moves to boost its presence at both the low and high ends by acquiring a Java Virtual Machine company and extending mainframe support for the BEA WebLogic application server.

At its BEA eWorld 2002 developer conference in San Diego, BEA announced the purchase of Appeal Virtual Machines AB, a JVM software firm based in Stockholm. BEA took over Appeal in a stock acquisition, though the companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

BEA, of San Jose, Calif., sought Appeals JVM expertise in delivering performance on Intel-based systems.

In a statement, BEA CEO Alfred Chuang said Appeals JVM product, known as JRockit, “is an extremely high performance … Java Virtual Machine optimized for every type of platform. In particular, with JRockit, we are able to offer very high performance Java-based technologies to our customers who are on Intel-based servers.”

The company said it would work to optimize JRockit to run on multiple platforms, including Intel Corp.s 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

“With the increasing platform heterogeneity in the enterprise, the acquisition of Appeals JVM is an important move for BEA,” said Michele Rosen, research manager at International Data Corp.

Meanwhile, as it makes moves to shore up its Intel-based architecture support, BEA also announced extended support for mainframes by announcing that the BEA WebLogic Server application server platform is available for IBM S/390 and zSeries mainframes running either Linux or the OS/390 operating systems.