BEA Systems

BEA Systems, Inc. was a company specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products which was wholly acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.[1]

Not to be confused with BAE Systems plc, a British defense and aerospace company.
BEA Systems, Inc.
Corporation
ISINUS0733251021 
IndustrySoftware Company
FatePurchased by Oracle in 2008
SuccessorOracle Corporation 
Founded1995 (1995)
FounderBill Coleman
Ed Scott
Alfred Chuang
Defunct2008
HeadquartersSan Jose, California, United States
ProductsTuxedo, WebLogic, AquaLogic
Revenue$1.535 billion USD (2008)
$208.2 million USD (2008)
WebsiteOracle and BEA

History

BEA began as a software company, founded in 1995 and headquartered in San Jose, California. It grew to have 78 offices worldwide at the time of its acquisition by Oracle.

The company's name is an initialism of the first names of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. All were former employees of Sun Microsystems, and launched the business in 1995 by acquiring Information Management and Independence Technologies. These firms were the largest resellers of Tuxedo, a distributed transaction management system sold by Novell. BEA soon acquired the Tuxedo product itself,[2][3] and went on to acquire other middleware companies and products.

In 1998, BEA acquired the San Francisco start-up WebLogic, which had built the first standards-based Java application server. WebLogic's application server became the impetus for the Sun Microsystems' J2EE specification and formed the basis of BEA's WebLogic application server sold today.

They were a sponsor for Team Rahal (now Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing) from 2002 to 2008, which included Buddy Rice's 2004 Indianapolis 500 win and Vitor Meira's 2005 Indianapolis 500 runner-up finish.

In 2005, BEA launched a new brand identity with the slogan "Think Liquid".[4] BEA also announced a new product line called AquaLogic, which is an infrastructure software family for service-oriented architecture (SOA). The same year, it made its entrance into telecommunications infrastructure through the acquisition of Incomit, a Swedish telecommunications software provider.[5] In late 2005 the company announced the acquisitions of Compoze Software, a provider of collaboration software,[6] M7, an Eclipse-based tools company,[7] and SolarMetric, editors of the Kodo persistence engine.[8]

The acquisitions continued in 2006 with Plumtree Software, an enterprise portal company; Fuego, a business process management (BPM) software company; and Flashline, a metadata repository company. These acquisitions have since become parts of the AquaLogic SOA product stack.

On October 12, 2007, Oracle announced their intent to buy BEA Systems for $6.7 billion.[9] As a result of the offer, BEA's stock price rose over five dollars upon the opening of trading for the day.[10] BEA turned the offer down the same day, saying that the company is "worth substantially more".[11] On January 16, 2008 Oracle signed a definite agreement to buy BEA for $8.5 billion. It is believed that Carl Icahn, one of the company's most prominent shareholders, was the main reason that the deal happened.[12]

On April 29, 2008 Oracle completed its acquisition of BEA.[13]

Products

BEA had three major product lines:

  1. Tuxedo, now Oracle Tuxedo - transaction-oriented middleware platform
  2. BEA WebLogic, now Oracle WebLogic Server - Java EE enterprise infrastructure platform
  3. AquaLogic, now Oracle Service Bus - Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform

BEA started out with the Tuxedo software product, but currently the products they are best known for in the computer industry are the WebLogic product family, which consists of WebLogic Server, WebLogic Workshop, WebLogic Portal, WebLogic Integration and JRockit. In 2005, BEA launched a new product family called AquaLogic for service-oriented architecture deployment. They have also entered the telecommunications field with their WebLogic Communications Platform, which includes WebLogic SIP Server and WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, technologies obtained through the acquisition of Swedish telecommunications software company Incomit.[5][14] BEA also has a product offering for the RFID market called the BEA WebLogic RFID Product Family.

AquaLogic

BEA Systems produced the AquaLogic software suite for managing service-oriented architecture (SOA). It includes following products:

  • BEA AquaLogic BPM suite, a set of business process management (BPM) tools. It combines workflow and process technology with enterprise application integration functionality. The suite consists of tools aimed for line of business personnel for creating business process models (AquaLogic BPM Designer), as well as tools for IT personnel to create actual business process applications directly from said models (AquaLogic BPM Studio). The completed business process applications are deployed on a production server (AquaLogic BPM Enterprise Server), from which they integrate to backend applications and generate portal views for human interactions in the process. It also comes with a customizable tools for live business activity monitoring (BAM).
  • BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, a set of tools used to create portals, collaborative communities composite applications and other applications that use service architecture. These technologies work cross-platform. This technology came to BEA Systems from its acquisition of Plumtree Software.
  • BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository, a vital element of effective Service-oriented architecture life cycle governance, manages the metadata for any type of software asset, from business processes and web services to patterns, frameworks, applications, and components. It maps the relationships and interdependencies that connect these assets to improve impact analysis, promote and systematize code reuse, and measure the impact on the bottom line.
  • BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, an enterprise service bus (ESB) with operational service-management that allows the interaction between services, routing relationships, transformations, and policies.
  • BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, a UDDI v3 registry with an embedded governance framework. It provides a repository where services can be registered and reused for developing or modifying applications.
  • BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform (previously known as Liquid Data), providing tools for creating and managing different data services. It uses the XQuery language for data composition and transformation for a variety of data sources, including relational databases and web services.
  • BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, a security infrastructure application for distributed authentication, fine-grained entitlements and other security services. Features include allowing users to define access rules for applications without modifying the software itself, including JSP pages, EJBs and portlets.
  • BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services (often shortened as ALCS), an e-Commerce solution based on Elastic Path e-Commerce solution integrated with WebLogic application server. Discontinued on version 6.0 in year 2009 (after BEA acquisition by Oracle).

See also

References
  1. "Oracle Completes Acquisition of BEA Systems". Archived from the original on 20 March 2011. Retrieved March 29, 2011.
  2. Andrade, Juan M.; et al. (1996). The TUXEDO System: Software for Constructing and Managing Distributed Business Applications. Addison-Wesley. pp. xxxiv. ISBN 0-201-63493-7.
  3. "Novell and BEA Systems, Inc. Complete Transition of TUXEDO to BEA" (Press release). BEA Systems, Inc. 1996-02-28. Retrieved 2008-04-07. BEA is the exclusive developer and distributor of the TUXEDO System on UNIX, NT, and all non-NetWare platforms, and Novell will develop TUXEDO-based applications for NetWare. In addition, most Novell TUXEDO employees, including development and marketing personnel, have joined BEA, and BEA has assumed all contracts with TUXEDO partners, distributors, and customers. BEA has exclusive rights to the TUXEDO trademark.
  4. "BEA Systems Launches New Brand Identity, Challenges IT Industry to "Think liquid."". Lexdon Business Library. 2005-06-09. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
  5. BEA buys Incomit to beef up telecom software
  6. "BEA Completes Acquisition of Compoze Software" (Press release). BEA Systems, Inc. 2005-07-23. Retrieved 2005-07-23. Compoze Software also enables portal customers to easily integrate Instant Messaging applications from Yahoo!, Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communication Server, as well as the ability to incorporate threaded discussions and group "white-boarding" to any portal.
  7. "BEA Takes Aggressive Step to Further Leadership in Developer Tools Market; Acquires Eclipse-based Company M7" (Press release). BEA Systems, Inc. 2005-09-28. Retrieved 2008-04-10. M7 offers an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called NitroX that offers unparalleled support for the development of sophisticated web applications based on open source and industry standard frameworks, including Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and JavaServer Pages.
  8. "BEA Systems Acquires SolarMetric, Inc.; Grabs Lead in Java EE 5 and Persistence Race" (Press release). BEA Systems, Inc. 2005-11-03. Retrieved 2008-04-10. SolarMetric, widely respected for its persistence technology around JDO, will help BEA achieve faster time to market with its flagship WebLogic Server product.
  9. "Oracle offers $6.7 billion for BEA Systems". Associated Press. KING-TV. 2007-10-12. Archived from the original on 2007-10-14. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  10. "BEA Systems, Inc. stock price". Google Finance. 2007-10-12. Archived from the original on 16 October 2007. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  11. Finkle, Jim (2007-10-12). "BEA rejects $6.7 billion Oracle offer". Yahoo! News. Archived from the original on 2007-10-16. Retrieved 2007-10-15.
  12. Turton, Stuart (2008-01-16). "Oracle finally bags BEA". PC Pro. Archived from the original on 21 March 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
  13. Corporate Information: Management and Board of Directors
  14. Bloomberg Businessweek - BEA Systems Sweden Telecom AB
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