BEA, a Software Maker, to Restate Results
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BEA Systems said Monday that it would restate results to reflect expenses associated with misdated stock option grants.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems on Wednesday continued to promote SOA 360, its newly announced SOA platform, at the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference. The company is making SOA, in which applications are offered as componentized services and combined for new applications, its focal point. BEA officials touted SOA 360, announced Tuesday and featuring BEA AquaLogic, WebLogic, and Tuxedo product lines, as well as a collaborative tooling environment called WorkSpace 360. Also critical to SOA 360 is BEA's microService Architecture (mSA), featuring the concept of a service network and notification services for publishing and discovering modular components. "BEA is taking SOA to its very core," said Paul Patrick, chief architect for BEA AquaLogic. "We're taking SOA into the heart of what we do [on] a day-to-day basis in the way we build products." "Over 1,000 of our customers have SOA solutions in production," said Mark Carges, executive vice president of BEA's Business Interaction Division. BEA views business process management as a business driver for SOA, he said. BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of World Wide Professional Services at BEA, cited six initiatives crucial to SOA: * Defining and capturing benefits. * Establishing an enterprise architecture. * Making services engineering a discipline. * Aligning the organization for shareholder value. * Building a stream of connected projects. * Connecting the business to the capability. "If your company is going to be successful, we believe that these are things that youâre going to have to take on," Graham said. BEA in November plans to offer a series of service offerings providing guidance on service engineering, he said. Even an attendee at the conference who is not currently using SOA was sold on the concept. "I think we're headed in that direction," said Louis Leon, manager of Web services at a nonprofit organization, the name of which Leon preferred to keep anonymous. "It's an architectural strategy at this point." SOA offers a more scalable alternative to point-to-point interfaces, Leon said. Part of BEA's mSA plan involves modularizing BEA products, including its WebLogic Server Java application server. Functions of the application server such as its security apparatus could be separated from the core product and offered in a modular fashion, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. Asked when BEA would be announcing formal plans for modularizing the application server, Connell said, "Stay tuned." BEA, meanwhile, is in discussions with a car company to service-enable cars with an in-vehicle application server for high-level automotive services, said Larry Cable, BEA chief architect for WebLogic. Possible applications emanating from this arrangement could include a system that generates e-mail notifications when a car's oil needs to be changed or an application notifying drivers of available parking spaces nearby, Cable said. Also at the conference, Connell lauded an upcoming Evans Data survey that says WebLogic Server is the top choice for developers.
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BEA Systems replied Monday to investor Carl Icahn&#39;s demand for a shareholder vote on purchase bids for the company.&quot;The Board and management of BEA Systems are not opposed to an acquisition of the company. In fact, we are currently exploring ways to maximize shareholder value, including the possible sale of the company,&quot; the statement reads in part.The board goes on to repeat its argument that Oracle&#39;s US$17 per share offer, which expired Sunday, was too low. BEA has asked for $21 per share but received no takers to date, or indeed any other public bids at all. Oracle&#39;s offer was worth $6.7 billion, as opposed to the approximately $8.3 billion BEA&#39;s asking price would command.BEA emphasized that it is open to being acquired. &quot;It is important that there be no misunderstanding of the Board&#39;s position. We are opposed to selling the company at $17.00 per share. We are not opposed to selling the company.&quot;Icahn is BEA&#39;s largest shareholder. He said in a statement Friday that he had filed suit in Delaware to force a shareholder meeting. The investor wants BEA&#39;s board to hold an auction sale, at which shareholders could consider offers from the highest bidder.To that end, Oracle did not rule out further bids in a statement released Sunday: &quot;The BEA shareholders should not assume that Oracle will renew its $17 per share offer in the future. Over time many things can change: BEA&#39;s business might materially weaken, the stock market can fall further from its recent record highs, or Oracle may have committed its capital elsewhere.&quot;BEA users have speculated over what might happen to the company&#39;s middleware technologies, should a sale to Oracle or another party go through.BEA&#39;s stock was trading at about $16.70 per share midday Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems and Adobe Systems are partnering on rich Internet application development in an arrangement incorporating both SOA and Web 2.0 concepts. The deal is being announced Tuesday at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference. BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder 2 software with the BEA Workshop Studio Java development environment. Through this bundling, developers can build cross-platform rich Internet applications that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure. Enterprise mashups also can result. "[The agreement] gives our developers access to the most innovative, rich Internet application platform," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop business unit. In the second part of the announcement, Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of the BEA WebLogic Server Java application server with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite software for building customer engagement applications. Combining Flex Builder and Workshop Studio is intended to give developers a workflow for building applications like interactive dashboards, customer and employee self-service applications, and business-to-business systems, BEA said. Applications are deployed using the Adobe Flash Player runtime. BEA's Workshop Bundle includes Flex Builder 2, Adobe's Eclipse-based IDE, and the Adobe Flex SDK, which is slated to be released under the open-source Mozilla Public License. The bundle is to enable developers to add rich interactivity to enterprise applications. While Workshop already features an SDK and IDE, Roth insisted there was no redundancy. Both Adobe and BEA have built on the Eclipse platform. "That allows both Workshop and Flex Builder to exist in one IDE." Roth said. "Eclipse provides the basic IDE framework. Workshop and Flex fill it out." Rich Internet applications developed with Workshop and Flex can be integrated with other BEA products, such as offerings from the WebLogic and AquaLogic families. This provides enterprise benefits pertinent to Web 2.0 and SOA, BEA said. Applications can be deployed using the planned Adobe Integrate Runtime technology for extending rich Internet applications to the desktop. "The Web 2.0 angle is, I think, really where Flex is really strong in allowing a more focused user interface and allowing a richer environment," Roth said. "Web 2.0 is about collaboration," and interacting with the customer, he added. For SOA, Adobe's architecture offers the notion of presentation services as well a framework for Flex applications to integrate with standard enterprise Java applications and SOA, Roth said. BEA's endorsement of Flex does not necessarily mean the company is choosing it over the popular AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technique for Web development. "In fact, we view both AJAX and Flex as being important rich Internet options, and our customers are looking for that," Roth said. "We found that segments of the customer base that are more developer-centric have a preference for AJAX while those who are more concerned with the interaction and have fairly significant interaction needs in terms of flexibility and creativity tend to go with Flex," especially in an enterprise context, he said. AJAX leverages HTML and JavaScript while Flex runs in the Flash Player, extends the browser, and has capabilities around graphics rendering, animation, and client code performance, said Adobe's Phil Costa, director of product management for Adobe Flex and ColdFusion. The Flex programming model focuses on data-driven applications as opposed to HTML, which was developed primarily around a documents paradigm, Costa said. Workshop bundled with Flex Builder 2 is due to be available by the end of the year with pricing starting at $899 retail. Also under the agreement, customers can deploy LiveCycle ES applications that leverage characteristics of WebLogic Server including Java Message Service to support business events, clustering and failover. Web services interoperability technologies are supported such as WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. While LiveCycle has worked with WebLogic Server before, users with this announcement will be provided with turnkey infrastructure for enterprise deployments. LiveCycle with WebLogic Server will available as a turnkey product early in 2008.
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InfoWorld - BEA Systems and Adobe Systems are partnering on rich Internet application development in an arrangement incorporating both SOA and Web 2.0 concepts.
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Finally a use for BEA It's a head-scratcher of a deal. Two big names in the same market with overlapping offerings. Surely the only justification for spending so much money is to buy customers to leapfrog the industry number one.â¦
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Search reality check From BEA Systems and its soon-to-be owner Oracle, from mighty IBM to a myriad of social network and online office start-ups, vendors have been telling us how the "Google generation" and Web 2.0 will change the way we work. Many have been flogging applications and middleware products, strategies and marketing puff to back this up.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will ship the three products featured in its social computing suite geared for Web 2.0 on Monday. The three products introduce modes of ad hoc collaboration and participation-driven experiences, said Jay Simons, BEA director of product marketing. Additionally, they take innovations spawned on the consumer Internet and apply them to the enterprise, adding security, governance, and management, he said. With the products, BEA is looking to empower users in the workplace, the company said. All bearing the AquaLogic nameplate, the three products include: * Pages, which is a mashup builder for business users to put together simple Web applications for business situations. * Ensemble, for Web application developers to build developer-oriented mashups featuring Web resources. * Pathways, featuring social bookmarking, tagging, and the ability to form social networks in an enterprise context. In touting its new products, BEA has been able to communicate how the suite can make a business become more efficient, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. BEA has been citing examples involving mashups and applications, he said. "Theyâre starting to tell stories and give credible examples of how those Web 2.0 [capabilities] can make your business agile," Kenney said. But BEA has been lacking in details on how governance and control are maintained over the applications built with the products, he said. "I think that I havenât seen enough detail about the mechanics of the technology. For instance, BEA hasn't given me a message or hasn't told me about how these technologies fit into their overall SOA governance initiatives," Kenney said. A Java application server is required to use the products but not necessarily BEA's application server, Simons said. Pricing for the products individually is either $40,000 per CPU or $64 per user.
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Market reaction to BEA Systems' stock options backdating inquiry this week provided a clue to investor psychology, while RealNetworks and Microsoft offered a look at the future of aspects of the software and services business.
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BEA Systems Inc. is planning to release this week a new version of its application suite targeted at its ISV partners. WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is an integrated suite that features core BEA technology
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will lock down the code for Workshop 10.1 this Friday in preparation for the Java development tool's release next month. "It leaves the shop Friday," said Bill Roth, the vice president of BEA's Workshop Division. "It's done." Workshop 10.1 is slated for release during the week after July 4, most likely hitting the Web July 12, he said. Announced in May, Workshop 10.1 aims to give developers a tool to develop Java applications using both commercial and open-source frameworks. The new tool combines Workshop for WebLogic with Workshop Studio, formerly called Nitrox, an Eclipse-based tool BEA acquired through its purchase of middleware company M7 in 2005. "It used to be that we literally had two separate code bases. The Studio stuff was different from the main Workshop line," Roth said. Bringing these tools together in a "blended" product will allow developers to more easily mix and match commercial and open-source frameworks when building their applications, he said. Workshop 10.1 is one of several products that BEA will ship in July. AquaLogic Pages, AquaLogic Ensemble, and AquaLogic Pathways, a set of tools to create collaborative applications with features such as tagging, wikis, and RSS feeds, are set to ship this month. BEA's WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, a tool that allows Java applications to run on a virtualization server without an operating system, is also scheduled to ship this month.
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Analysis of the BEA acquisition from Reg reader input â¦
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Oracle said Wednesday that it will finally acquire BEA Systems, an enterprise software maker, for about $8.5 billion in cash. The deal agreement marks an end to a strange, months-long kabuki dance in which Oracle abandoned its first bid and both sides seemed to adopt a hard-line bargaining stance. BEA's board unanimously approved Oracle's offer [...].
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BEA Systems at the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday is adding the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open source development initiative.
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The board of BEA Systems Inc  said on Monday that it is still looking at ways to maximize shareholder value, including the possible sale of the company, after a bid from Oracle Corp  expired on Sunday.
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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems and several other vendors on Wednesday will release an early draft of a specification intended to ease integration of Java-based systems, but IBM and BEA Systems have dropped out of participation in the effort.
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BEA Systems is readying the release of new software that will combine an enterprise service bus (ESB) and Web services management software into one product, a company executive said Friday.