BEA Systems, Inc.

File:BEA Systems logo.png
Type	Subsidiary
Founded	1995
Headquarters	San Jose, California, USA
Products	Tuxedo, Weblogic, AquaLogic
Revenue	$1.535 billion USD (2008)
Net income	$208.2 million USD (2008)
Parent	Oracle Corporation
Website	www.bea.com

BEA Systems, Inc. specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products known as "middleware", which connect software applications to databases and was acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.^[1]

History[link]

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 acronym 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, including ObjectBroker and NCR's Top End product.

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.

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] As of 2008, Alfred Chuang is still with the company.

Financial results[link]

In January 2008, BEA Systems closed out its fiscal year 2008 with $1.535bn in revenues, 10% higher than the previous year. GAAP net income reached $208.2 million.^[14]

Products[link]

BEA had three major product lines:

1. 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^[update] 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 ^[15][16]. BEA also has a product offering for the RFID market called the BEA WebLogic RFID Product Family.

AquaLogic[link]

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[link]

• List of acquisitions by Oracle

References[link]

External links[link]

• BEA Systems - World Website
• BEA YouTube Channel
• Logical progression, insight into BEA Systems at CBRonline.com (2001)
• AquaLogic Commerce Services product documentation
• Elastic Path year 2008 news acknowledging BEA using Elastic Path as a base for ALCS

Adam Bosworth at the MySQL Users Conference 2005.

Adam Bosworth was a Vice President of Product Management at Google Inc. from 2004–2007; prior to that, he was senior VP Engineering and Chief Software Architect at BEA Systems responsible for the engineering efforts for BEA's Framework Division.^[1] Bosworth had co-founded Crossgain, a software development firm acquired by BEA in 2001. Crossgain's "Cajun" project developed into BEA's WebLogic Workshop product. At BEA, Bosworth also developed the Alchemy intelligent caching framework in a team consisting of Bosworth and his son, Alex. Alchemy was a software layer used by Internet Explorer to communicate with a corresponding software layer on the web server allowing both upload and download data to be cached when the browser was disconnected from the network. Architecturally, this approach is similar to the design of the Google Web Accelerator although that product only performs server-side caching, rather than client-side caching.

Known as one of the pioneers of XML technology,^[2] Bosworth previously held various senior management positions at Microsoft, including General Manager of the WebData group, a team focused on defining and driving XML strategy. While at Microsoft, he was responsible for designing and delivering the Microsoft Access PC database product (codenamed 'Cirrus') and assembling and driving the team that developed Internet Explorer 4.0's HTML engine (codenamed 'Trident').

Prior to Microsoft, Bosworth worked for Borland where he developed the Quattro spreadsheet application following Borland's acquisition of Analytica in 1985 - founded by Bosworth and Eric Michelman, and managed by Brad Silverberg.

Bosworth graduated from St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, which was founded by his father, Stanley Bosworth, and received his bachelor's degree in History from Harvard University in 1976.

At Google, Bosworth was^[3] heading a division known as Google Health, and reports ^[4] suggested that he was operating under the title of "Architect" of the project at that time.

While the reasons for his departure from Google were not immediately clear, according to a post on his blog, Bosworth is working on a new startup, Keas.

External links[link]

• Adam Bosworth's blog
• Adam Bosworth at Dreamforce 2005
• Audio of talk by Adam Bosworth at the MySQL Users Conference 2005
• Audio of Gillmor Gang discussion with Adam Bosworth

References[link]