Although the company will not call it a comeback, BEA Systems Inc. is beginning the process of stabilizing the company after a series of high-level defections.
As a start, San Jose, Calif.-based BEA recently named Wai Wong to the position of executive vice president, products. Wong, who started with the company last week, brings 22 years of experience to his new role with the application infrastructure company.
“I came to BEA around a week ago. Prior to that I was senior vice president and general manager for the Unicenter business unit at CA [Computer Associates International Inc.], which accounts for a large percentage of CAs revenue,” Wong said.
As part of the new BEA Executive Leadership Team, Wong reports directly to CEO Alfred Chuang and manages a division of more than 700 employees who are responsible for executing the BEA product vision.
In that regard, Wong said BEA will continue to carry out the vision of former BEA stars such as Adam Bosworth, who went to Google Inc. in late July, and Scott Dietzen, who left the company last month. Wong said BEA will continue to implement the Liquid Computing strategy and Bosworths occasionally connected systems strategy, known as Alchemy, and that customers will not lose a step with the new regime.
“I felt BEA was a world-class organization and their products [offer] best-of-breed functionality as well as a well-integrated platform that ties the best-of-breed functions together,” Wong said.
“I think it will be a fun process to take BEA to the next level,” he added.
In addition, Wong noted that a recent study by The Middleware Company Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., showed that BEAs WebLogic Server ranked atop the J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application server market in both mind share and market share. According to the survey, BEA WebLogic Server outpaced IBM Corp.s WebSphere by 13 percent in the mind share of respondents with hands-on experience, by 9 percent in the market share for those in development, and by 10 percent in the market share for those in production.
In his new role on the BEA Executive Leadership Team, Wong will work alongside Mark Carges, BEAs recently appointed chief technology officer, and Tom Ashburn, also recently tapped to the companys newly established BEA Worldwide Field Organization.
