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News: BEA to Acquire Portal Vendor Plumtree Software

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  1. BEA to Acquire Portal Vendor Plumtree Software (10 messages)

    BEA and Plumtree Software today announced that BEA will acquire Plumtree for approximately USD$200 million in cash. Plumtree Software provides enterprise portal solutions to connect disparate work groups, IT systems and business processes. Its portfolio features the industry's only cross-platform portal, running on both J2EE and .Net.

    The move marks a shift for BEA in a number of new directions:
     - BEA has now diversified beyond J2EE and Tuxedo with a .NET product offering
     - BEA sees massive growth potential in the Portals market
     - BEA is continuing to diversify beyond developer tools, Plumtree is fairly well known as being a portal that doesn't require much coding

    It is unclear as to what impact this purchase will have on WL Portal, which is a competing product to Plumtree's.

    "The Portal is becoming the major point of integration in the enterprise," said Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive officer, BEA Systems, Inc. "Customers will benefit from the powerful combination of BEA as the leader in portal, application and service infrastructure, and Plumtree, as the leader in portal and collaboration software. The acquisition of the Plumtree portfolio will make BEA the leading provider of the most open, extensible and standards-based J2EE, .Net and Service-Oriented platform in the industry."

    A recorded conference call with BEA and Plumbtree can also be heard here.
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    Threaded Messages (10)

  2. .NET ... or PHP. Looking form something w/ ROI.[ Go to top ]

    http://news.com.com/Java+devotee+BEA+eyes+scripting+languages/2100-1012_3-5820062.html

    .V

    http://roomity.com/demo.jsp
    Reply to this Reply to original

  3. Great deal for BEA[ Go to top ]

    Plumtree is a fine portal product.

    Well, my real question is how come it's so cheap?

    Especially comparing to the two recent deals:

    Experian bough lowermybills.com for 380 millions
    http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3502766

    IBM bought gluecode for about 100 millions
    http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33830
    Reply to this Reply to original

  4. Great deal for BEA[ Go to top ]

    Plumtree is a fine portal product.Well, my real question is how come it's so cheap? Especially comparing to the two recent deals:Experian bough lowermybills.com for 380 millionshttp://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3502766IBM bought gluecode for about 100 millionshttp://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33830

    Because the other guys grossly overpaid? ;)
    Reply to this Reply to original

  5. Purchase price is a function...[ Go to top ]

    of demonstrable market share over some arbitrary period in the future.

    My guess is that the portal vendor's business plan couldn't justify more than 200 million in that period.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  6. Great deal for BEA[ Go to top ]

    Remember that Plumtree has almost $70 million in cash too.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  7. What BEA wants[ Go to top ]

    It seems that BEA is finding it really tough to compete with IBM. They wants to open-up another market for them where IBM is not much strong.

    Also it seems that they got really good bargain.

    -- Punit Pandey
    http://portlets.blogspot.com
    Reply to this Reply to original

  8. What BEA wants[ Go to top ]

    I think BEA realizes, application server market is no longer a revenue generating sector. Considering many good open source alternatives available, very few companies now go for new licenses from either BEA or IBM. Most of the big companies already have either weblogic or websphere licenses. On top of that BEA doesn't have a consulting service like IBM's global service to push for it's weblogic licenses.

    Hence pushing in the niche sector like Portal & Integration is a better business sense for BEA. With Content management and enterprise integration using portal, BPM and ESB picking up steam, BEA is pretty well positioned there. Since weblogic platform8.1, BEA has been pushing Portal8.1 a lot. Too bad an excellent product like Weblogic Integration8.1 sometimes takes the back seat for them. Or atleast that was my perception.

    Bijan
    Reply to this Reply to original

  9. What BEA wants[ Go to top ]

    Considering many good open source alternatives available, very few companies now go for new licenses from either BEA or IBM.

    If you look at the financial results of both companies and the marketshare surveys, this just isn't true. BEA sold almost $120 million in new license revenue this quarter. Sure, growth has generally been flat, but most companies still are buying new licenses.

    The point is that there certainly is a trend that the app server market isn't growing. Open source probably is a factor, but I doubt it's the main one (saturation + new IT spending habits probably are).

    Most of the big companies already have either weblogic or websphere licenses.

    And they continue to buy more as they deploy more applications... remember that "all you can eat" enterprise deals tend to only last for a defined period of time. If there is still internal demand within a company, there tends to be financial incentive to renew these deals and purchase other products in the stack while you're at it.

    Since weblogic platform8.1, BEA has been pushing Portal8.1 a lot. Too bad an excellent product like Weblogic Integration8.1 sometimes takes the back seat for them.

    Portal certainly has a lot of momentum, but I would attribute that to its visual nature -- it's an easier sell to executive sponsors. Still, in my experience WLI is doing very well, but it requires customers to look at systems in terms of services & processes instead of applications with point-to-point links, something that both developers and executives are still learning.

    So, I think you're on the right path, but I would refine your comment to say that the application infrastructure market is no longer a "growth generating" sector -- it certainly still generates a lot of revenue (Tuxedo is still selling too :-) The service infrastructure market (filled by the AquaLogic platform) is what will generate future growth...

    (above is my personal opinion, I work for BEA but do not speak for it).
    Reply to this Reply to original

  10. BEA to Acquire Portal Vendor Plumtree Software[ Go to top ]

    Plumtree is one of the pioneers in Portal space and has really come a long way. With its support for cross-platform, running both on J2EE and .Net, it has opened up a big market share. Now with BEA acquiring Plumtree we have to wait and watch as to how BEA will strengthen Plumtree Portal. And also what impact this will have on Weblogic's own Portal Server.

    Shishank
    http://goshishank.blogspot.com
    Reply to this Reply to original

  11. Another stand alone product vendor dead?[ Go to top ]

    Looks like another niche portal vendor has been goobled up an infrastructure vendor.

    Long live the stand alone portal product!

    /a
    http://apoorv.info
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