Senin, 02 Juni 2008

Oracle acquires BEA

Now the sight on the merger (or actually I should say acquisition, I know….) between Oracle and BEA is getting clearer also speculations start about what will happen to BEA. Well the truth is that we’ll all have to sit this one out. I am in tight contact with people at BEA in The Netherlands, but they also don’t know what will happen exactly. Since we do like to know what will be our future I think it will harm nobody if I shed some light on what I think will happen.

Here I go…

To my opinion what made BEA worthwhile to Oracle is especially the Weblogic Server base of their products. Oracle doesn’t have such a state-of-the-art JEE platform, with the great scalability and high availability options the Weblogic Server base has. Also the way BEA is progressing in the Virtualization of their product stack is something Oracle is still dreaming of. One of the Aqualogic products that will also be adopted by Oracle will definitely be BEA’s Aqualogic Service Bus (ALSB). Although Oracle has got its own, the ALSB product by far better than the Oracle Service Bus.

Parts of the BEA product stack highly overlap with products that can already be found in the Oracle product stack. Take for instance BEA’s BPM Suite, people won’t like this, but Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager does the same thing (and maybe even better) so the former Fuego product will probably have a hard time within the new Oracle | BEA organization.

So the bottom-line to this all is that Oracle will definitely take a look which jewels to pick from BEA’s crown and which jewels they already have and put them on their new Integration and SOA crown. Maybe even rebranding them all to Fusion, maybe some of them will still be called BEA.

Update 6-6-2008...

Well in the mean time one thing seems to be sure: As I predicted the ALSB product will be chosen as Oracle's new Enterprise Service Bus product! What they probably will be doing however, is getting the ALSB product to run on several other JEE platforms (not only the Weblogic stack). It also seems that the WLI and the SOA counterpart Aqualogic Integration (combination of ALSB and WLI) will not be continuedin favour of Oracle's BPEL Process Manager.