bea systems

During the last week, the talk on the street about struggling BEA Systems has become more concentrated on not if the company will be acquired, but when it will be acquired.

ADVERTISEMENT The rumors first surfaced a full year and a half ago within the futuristic, rounded blue glass walls of its main application server and Web services competitor, Oracle, when whispers began among people "in the know" that Larry Ellison & Co. had its cap set to snare BEA, as soon as the situation was ripe. That is, when the stock price came down far enough.

In fact, Oracle Chairman Jeffrey O. Henley confidently told a respected financial analyst a while back: "Don't worry, we'll get them―but in our own time."

Well, that situation may be coming to pass, and possibly sooner rather than later.

BEA, which makes the highly regarded Java-based WebLogic application server line, hasn't had outstanding financial reports of late. Its stock, selling at $11.41 at the close today, is back to exactly where it was a year ago, after setting a five-year high of $16 last November. It's been as low as $5 (in the second quarter of 2002).

Read here about BEA's WebLogic Server 10.

Its revenue for fiscal first quarter 2007 totaled $342 million, well short of Wall Street estimates of $357.8 million, and previous guidance of $350 million to $365 million.



After that most recent report, CEO Alfred Chuang said the company "saw a difficult selling environment, especially in the Americas, and several large deals slipped out of the quarter." He also said that the company made some changes in its sales organization in the quarter, which "caused some disruption in the short run."

Most analysts read between the lines fairly easily in that assessment: Oracle, Chuang could have simply said, is eating BEA's lunch. If Oracle swallows BEA, there goes yet another competitor down the gullet, as far as Larry Ellison is concerned.

With a market cap of $4.49 billion, a large installed base, and a solid reputation for quality IP and products, BEA would be a tempting acquisition for somebody. It's a fine company with good management and respected products that apparently is having a tough go of it from a sales perspective.

Trip Chowdhry, of Midwest Research in Cleveland, told Baron's several weeks ago that he has heard very strong rumors in the Valley that the company could be acquired by Hewlett-Packard at around $15 a share.



eWEEK has heard the same rumor, indirectly from a BEA employee on the East Coast and from other sources. Like most companies, Oracle, HP and BEA―as one might expect―do not officially comment on rumors.

Chowdhry says his information is that 70 percent of BEA deployments happen to be on HP's hardware, so a merger―at least in terms of products―would be natural. He also believes that Oracle has
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is one of the major companies developing enterprise infrastructure software. Founded in 1995, BEA has specialized in the enterprise infrastructure software market throughout its 12 year history, and currently has 78 offices in 37 countries. BEA is headquartered in San Jose, California.

The company's name is an acronym based on the first names of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. Alfred Chuang is still with the company, acting as the chairman and CEO.





[edit] History
The company's name comes from the first initial of each of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang, all former employees of Sun Microsystems. They 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. They soon acquired the Tuxedo product itself. BEA went on to acquire other middleware companies and products, including ObjectBroker and NCR's Top End product.

In 1998, BEA acquired the San Francisco start-up WebLogic, which was among the first to implement Sun Microsystems' J2EE specification. WebLogic's re-branded server formed the basis of BEA's WebLogic application server sold today.

In 2005, Lexdon Business Library reported BEA's announcement of a new brand identity and their new slogan "Think Liquid." BEA also announced a new product line called AquaLogic, which is an infrastructure software family for Service Oriented Architecture.

On November 3, 2005 BEA Systems announced the acquisition of SolarMetric, editors of the Kodo persistence engine. 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.[2] As a result of the offer, BEA's stock price rose over five dollars upon the opening of trading for the day.[3]


[edit] Financial Results
On the 22 February 2007 BEA Systems closed out its fiscal year with $1.4bn in revenues, 17% higher than the previous year. And it came out of the year with $1.2bn in cash, retiring over $250m in convertible debt.


[edit] Products
BEA has three major product lines,

The Tuxedo Transaction Oriented Middleware platform
The WebLogic J2EE Enterprise Infrastructure platform and
The AquaLogic 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 BEA 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. BEA also has a product offering for the RFID market called the BEA WebLogic RFID Product Family.


[edit] AquaLogic
AquaLogic is a software suite from BEA Systems for managing service-oriented architecture (SOA). It includes following products:

BEA AquaLogic BPM suite is 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 sever (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 is a set of tools used to create portals, collaborative communities composite applications and other applications that use service architecture. These technologies work cross-platform.
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 software reuse, and measure the impact on the bottom line.
BEA AquaLogic Service Bus is an enterprise service bus (ESB) with operational service-management that allows the interaction between services, routing relationships, transformations, and policies.
BEA AquaLogic Service Registry is 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) provides 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 is 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.