Oracle spells out BEA product plans

July 1, 2008 (IDG News Service) Oracle Corp. executives described the company's plans to integrate its products with those of BEA Systems Inc. in exhaustive detail during a nearly two-hour webcast today.

Oracle closed an $8.5 billion deal for middleware maker BEA in April, capping off a lengthy and rancorous bid process that produced a churn of counteroffers, public sparring and shareholder saber-rattling. Today's meeting was the first time executives spelled out a detailed strategy for combining the companies' product sets, which overlap in some areas.

"Middleware is a very complex area," said Oracle's president, Charles Phillips. "We want to provide a complete backbone for developing and deploying SOA."

All BEA products will continue under existing support timelines, with "no forced migration at all," Phillips said.

But moving forward, the combined company's middleware and infrastructure catalog will be broken into three categories: strategic, "continue and converge," and "maintenance," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president for Oracle's Fusion middleware.

Strategic products will be Oracle's high-end offerings. BEA assets flagged for the "continue and converge" category will be "incrementally redesigned" to incorporate Oracle's Fusion middleware stack and continued for "at least nine years," Kurian said.

Meanwhile, products BEA had put into maintenance mode prior to the acquisition will remain that way under their existing terms, he said.

Oracle plans to conduct a tour to further explain its plans to customers and partners, and it has set up a voluminous repository of information about the combined product strategy on its Web site. The highlights include the following:

• BEA WebLogic Server is now Oracle's lead application server, but Oracle will continue developing its own application server. "Particularly for [Oracle] E-Business Suite customers, you will not need to migrate to WebLogic," Kurian said.
• Oracle will adopt BEA's JRockit as its go-to JVM (Java virtual machine), but that doesn't mean it will stop supporting other JVM implementations, according to Kurian.
• Oracle plans to converge its enterprise service bus with its BEA counterpart. The latter has a "lot of highly elegant features," Kurian said. Both BEA and Oracle ESB customers will get an automatic upgrade to the new product, according to Kurian.
• Oracle WebCenter will remain the company's lead portal software. BEA's WebLogic Portal will continue to be developed and it will be integrated over time with WebCenter Framework.

"On the plus side, however, Oracle has a good track record in supporting the customers of acquired companies," he said in an e-mail message. "They know the BEA acquisition was mostly about customer acquisition, so they're likely to bend over backwards to keep BEA's customers around. But on the technology side, the integration will keep their hands full."

Reprinted with permission from

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