Wet Woos Fire: BEA Systems Acquires Fuego

BEA Systems continued its flow into the burgeoning SOA software market yesterday by shelling out $87.5 million to acquire business process management (BPM) provider Fuego. The acquisition is intended to expand BEA's infrastructure products for building SOA. BEA says FuegoBPM will be integrated into its AquaLogic family of SOA management products and provide the foundation of a new business service interaction product line. In general, AquaLogic products provide companies with the infrastructure for SOA. Before the Fuego acquisition, AquaLogic was primarily targeted at software developers and IT departments looking to ease the process of building business applications. The acquisition will extend the AquaLogic line to business executives and managers with the BPM offerings, according to BEA. Alfred Chuang, chairman and CEO of BEA, said in a statement that the deal was indicative of the vendor's commitment to the SOA market. "The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments." Fuego has focused on the financial services and telecommunications sectors, and competes against IBM and Tibco Software, according to the company. Fuego had previously had a manufacturing agreement with Web-portal apps provider Plumtree Software, until BEA acquired it for $200 million in August 2005. That deal was designed to allow BEA customers to build Web interfaces for Java and Microsoft .Net servers. Heather Bellini, an analyst at UBS, says the acquisition is a good match for the two companies. "Fuego's software provides BEA with access to the big missing piece in its AquaLogic product line," she said in a research note. "Their existing process tooling wasn't particularly service oriented, and service oriented processes are clearly on the AquaLogic road map. The deal is part of an acquisition strategy that BEA has followed in the past year. Last year it not only snapped up Plumtree, but also announced smaller deals like the purchase of applications tool developer M7 and relational-database tools maker SolarMetric. "Fuego is strong in the telecom and financial services verticals, and more than 50 percent of its customers will be new to BEA," Bellini said. "Fuego will also likely expand BEA's reach in customers as it targets business line heads {versus} IT departments." Related articles: SOA Simple Plumtree Opens New Suite Doors

Related Articles

Appian Gets Mega-Friendly

Appian, a provider of business process management software, partners with enterprise architecture specialist Mega automates and streamlines business processes.