Scott McNealy announced in the Java One keynote this morning that Sun has acquired SeeBeyond Technology Corporation, a best of breed EAI vendor that builds ICAN, an integration solution that allows building composite applications from a variety of services, both legacy and otherwise, within the enterprise.

Jim Demetriades, CEO of SeeBeyond was brought to stage and talked a bit about the history of SeeBeyond, and it's capabilities as an EAI solution. According to Jim, "ICAN is the worlds only organically developed integration software that runs on application servers... It runs in a variety of industries have all standardized on this technology for integrating their entire enterprise." Jim re-iterated that a massive company like Sun will be able to do a lot more with SeeBeyond, given it's company relationships, than SeeBeyond could, as a 200M company.

The SeeBeyond acquisition makes Sun a serious player in the EAI/SOA space, particular in relation to BEA and IBM. Given Sun's commitment to JBI (Java Business Integration), owning SeeBeyond will certainly add a lot of weight to the JBI initiative.

The acquisition was just signed this morning, but has yet to pass through legal and share holder approval. For more information, the management teams of both companies will host a financial analyst and investor conference call today at 5:15 am PDT. The call can be accessed at 888-692-0418 (U.S.) or 706-643-7750 (outside U.S.) with conference call ID #7453321. The conference call will also be webcast at http://www.sun.com/investors. A phone relpay will be available at 800-642-1687 (U.S.) or 706-645-9291 (outside U.S.) on June 28th.

I can't help thinking Sun would be better off spending their cash on a combination of seasoned developers and recent graduates and just 'letting them loose' to see what they can come up with.

But thats not going to happen, 'C' execs don't ever think of R&D these days, its got to be the easy 'apparent' win.

I can't help thinking Sun would be better off spending their cash on a combination of seasoned developers and recent graduates and just 'letting them loose' to see what they can come up with.But thats not going to happen, 'C' execs don't ever think of R&D these days, its got to be the easy 'apparent' win.

You're absolutely wrong. Over the last four years Sun spent more than 8 billions dollars for r&d.
Recently there have been built (and there are being built) new development centers all over the world.

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,102241,00.html

You're absolutely wrong. Over the last four years Sun spent more than 8 billions dollars for r&d. Recently there have been built (and there are being built) new development centers all over the world. http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,102241,00.html

Wow 8 Billion Dollars ( Said in Dr Evil voice ) :-)

They don't appear to have gotten much return on their investment...

8 Billion Dollars ( Said in Dr Evil voice ) :-)They don't appear to have gotten much return on their investment...

Rather amusing that you post this on a Java site considering where Java comes from...

8 Billion Dollars ( Said in Dr Evil voice ) :-)They don't appear to have gotten much return on their investment...

Rather amusing that you post this on a Java site considering where Java comes from...

You are so correct, In 1994 I would have put the development cost of the current Java IP that Sun owns at 8 billion...

You have to give credit to Sun for keep on fitting while going down. Based on McNealy's presentation, they really believe that "The next “Internet Wave” will be the integration of legacy applications into new, composite applications". Buying SeeBeyond and pushing JBI and OpenESB was the only choice they had to try to get into that game. It will be interesting to see if they learnt anything from the killing of NetDynamics/Kiva/Forte (to be continued). -Edwin

In a matter of hours, Sun announced Open ESB (open source integration framework) and the acquisition of SeeBeyond (proprietary vendor of integration software).

How would Sun keep the balance between collaborative development and commercial / proprietary offers? There would be a clear conflict of interests between Sun and contributors to Open ESB.

http://os3g.blogspot.com/2005/06/sun-acquires-seebeyond.html

Well, it works with the Netbeans, Java Studio and Java Creator ...

Also with the Tomcat and SUN App Server 7/8 ...

Well, it works with the Netbeans, Java Studio and Java Creator ...Also with the Tomcat and SUN App Server 7/8 ...

It works with these products?
They make zero dollars from Tomcat, Netbeans is trailing Eclipse miles behind as well as JavaStudio, Sun AppServer is nowhere on the market compared to JBoss, BEA, WebSphere even Oracle.
Things may change, but so far I do not see much revenue generated with these products.

So we'll see. I hope they don't dunk the SeeBeyond with poor management, and crazy dreams.

Regards,
Edmon Begoli
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/software/

How would Sun keep the balance between collaborative development and commercial / proprietary offers? There would be a clear conflict of interests between Sun and contributors to Open ESB.http://os3g.blogspot.com/2005/06/sun-acquires-seebeyond.html

I can say with a lot of confidence that no conflict is going to occur. SeeBeyond has a very deep knowledge of the open-source market. Even if ICAN is commercially proprietary, it is completely based on open standards and technologies, so it would be a lot easy for Sun to open the product to the extern, if they'll decide so. Just for example, the ICAN IDE is largely based on Netbeans, and many ICAN suite's modules are Netbeans plugins. Then think also about J2EE, XML, BPEL, WS-I open standards, all already implemented and enforced by Seebeyond's products.

Regards,
Maurizio

This is great news, the irony; SeeBeyond was a "closed" integration software vendor. I hope SUN will make SeeBeyond open friendly, I don't mean open source, but open to other integrators.

Great opportunity for SUN to offer solutions for healthcare integration, especially the Electronic Health Record (EHR) initiatives – every other vendor in this space is pushing proprietary stuff.

SUN, please jettison Seebeyond's management; bring in fresh "open" minded folks.

I’m going to stop advising against SeeBeyond for now