BEA Systems

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BEA Systems, Inc.
Type	Public (NASDAQ: BEAS)
Founded	1995
Headquarters	San Jose, California, USA
Key people	Alfred Chuang, Founder, Chairman & CEO Mark Dentinger, EVP & CFO Tom Ashburn, President, Worldwide Field Organization Rosanne Saccone, SVP & CMO Bill Klein, EVP, Business Planning and Development Wai Wong, EVP, Products Bruce Pasternack, Board of Directors Rob Levy, CTO Jeanne Wu, SVP, Human Resources
Products	Tuxedo, WebLogic, AquaLogic
Revenue	Image:Green Arrow Up Darker.svg$1.4 billion USD (2006)
Net income	Image:Green Arrow Up Darker.svg$142.7 million USD (2005)
Employees	4,275^[1]
Slogan	"Think liquid."
Website	www.bea.com

BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is one of the major companies developing enterprise infrastructure software. BEA makes middleware, products that help software run on top of databases. Founded in 1995, BEA has specialized in the enterprise infrastructure software market throughout its 12 year history, and currently has 78 offices in 37 countries. BEA is headquartered in San Jose, California.

The company's name is an acronym based on the first names of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. Alfred Chuang is still with the company, acting as the chairman and CEO.

1 History
2 Financial results
3 Products
- 3.1 AquaLogic
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang, all former employees of Sun Microsystems, 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. They soon acquired the Tuxedo product itself. BEA 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 was among the first to implement Sun Microsystems' J2EE specification. WebLogic's re-branded server formed the basis of BEA's WebLogic application server sold today.

In 2005, Lexdon Business Library reported BEA's announcement of a new brand identity and their new slogan "Think Liquid." BEA also announced a new product line called AquaLogic, which is an infrastructure software family for Service Oriented Architecture.

On November 3, 2005 BEA Systems announced the acquisition of SolarMetric, editors of the Kodo persistence engine. 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.^[2] As a result of the offer, BEA's stock price rose over five dollars upon the opening of trading for the day.^[3] BEA turned the offer down the same day, saying that the company is "worth substantially more".^[4]

[edit] Financial results

On the 22 February 2007 BEA Systems closed out its fiscal year with $1.4bn in revenues, 17% higher than the previous year. And it came out of the year with $1.2bn in cash, retiring over $250m in convertible debt.

[edit] Products

BEA has three major product lines,

The Tuxedo Transaction Oriented Middleware platform
The WebLogic J2EE Enterprise Infrastructure platform and
The AquaLogic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform.

BEA started out with the Tuxedo software product, but currently the products they are best known for in the computer industry are the BEA 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. BEA also has a product offering for the RFID market called the BEA WebLogic RFID Product Family.

[edit] AquaLogic

AquaLogic is a software suite from BEA Systems for managing service-oriented architecture (SOA). It includes following products:

BEA AquaLogic BPM suite is 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 sever (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 is 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 software reuse, and measure the impact on the bottom line.
BEA AquaLogic Service Bus is an enterprise service bus (ESB) with operational service-management that allows the interaction between services, routing relationships, transformations, and policies.
BEA AquaLogic Service Registry is 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) provides 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 is 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.