Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Tech analysis: BEA's sweet portfolio

January 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Tech analysis: BEA's sweet portfolio

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The conventional wisdom about Oracle's takeover of BEA says that Oracle is buying market share, not acquiring technology. After all, there's a broad overlap between Oracle’s Fusion middleware and BEA’s WebLogic and AquaLogic suites. But that reasoning doesn't do justice to some glittering technology gems in BEA’s portfolio.

To begin with, BEA’s AquaLogic Service Bus (as in ESB, or enterprise service bus) not only has major market share, it’s a mature product that even competitors express admiration for, with a superior management console with integrated runtime monitoring.

BEA boasts other attractive technology central to SOA (service oriented architecture). While both Oracle and BEA rely on Systinet for their service registry, for example, BEA has recently integrated the Systinet registry with the Flashline repository that BEA acquired in 2006 (together now called AquaLogic Registry Repository). The company has also mixed in two other acquisitions: Fuego business processes management (now AquaLogic BPM) and the Plumtree portal (now part of AquaLogic User Interaction). The successful combination of these solution layers – all potentially vital parts of a complete enterprise SOA solution – into one fully integrated stack may be whetting Oracle’s appetite more than any individual technology asset.

Not to minimize the attractive bits. AquaLogic User Interaction, for example, incorporates strong .Net technology, delivering a nice cross-platform twist on top of BEA’s Java foundation. Plus, the portal component has led the enterprise portal space in incorporating Web 2.0 technologies, including AJAX, widgets, and Wikis.

Another, lesser-known nugget: the AquaLogic Data Services Platform. Consolidating enterprise data and making it available as a service is highly desirable for a large-scale SOA with composite applications that must draw upon multiple data stores. And it's interesting to note that IBM, which has made more noise about data integration across the enterprise than anyone with its Information On Demand initiative, does not yet have an enterprise-class data-as-a-service solution.

So, in fact, there’s no shortage of technology reasons for Oracle’s purchase, nor any mystery about which competitor Oracle is arming itself against with its new BEA arsenal. IBM has all the SOA puzzle pieces BEA and Oracle have, but unlike with BEA’s integrated solution, you need IBM Global Services to put those pieces together. And just about everyone knowledgeable about SOA agrees that some sort of data services solution is necessary for a successful SOA.

Posted by Eric Knorr on January 16, 2008 10:26 AM

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