I was unable to attend Oracle’s BEA Strategy Briefing on July 1, but fortunately enough I made it to their respective BEA Day in Hotel Kämp, Helsinki, today.

Kimmo Vilen, CEO of Oracle Finland, opened the day on behalf of both companies. He referred to the previous successful mergers of Oracle in Finland (e.g. Siebel, Hyperion) and asssured that the coming integration with BEA will be “seamless”. In his opening note, Ari Pussinen, General Manager in BEA, also convinced the audience that the merger will be valuable.

The main presentations of the morning were given by two Martins of Oracle: Martijn Vlek, Solution Specialist Director, and Martin Percival, Senior Director, Product Management.

Martijn Vlek is responsible for the acquisitions at Oracle. He provided some background of Oracle’s history in the middleware market, highlighting that due to the significant R&D investment in its Fusion middleware Oracle has rapidly grown from scratch to an offering that surpasses $1 B in annual revenue. He provided some rationale for the BEA acquisition by maintaining that the product lines of the two companies are complementary while the architectures are aligned. Vlek praised BEA for being a pioneer in middleware and having an innovative team with strong expertise. The acquisition strengthens Oracle’s presence in strategic markets such as Asia geography and telecom industry and further expands the company’s partner and channel ecosystem. However, Vlek admitted that BEA will be a “tougher cookie” in comparison to prior M&A’s: the customer base grows from 55,000 to 77,000 customers.

The most interesting presentation was given by Martin Percival who outlined Oracle’s product roadmap and distinguished thereby three product baskets:

  1. Strategic Products (S): BEA products being adopted immediately with limited redesign
  2. Continue & Converge (C): BEA products being incrementally redesigned to integrate with Oracle Fusion Middleware; gradual integration and continued development and maintenance for at least 9 years
  3. Maintenance (M): BEA products EOL’d due to limited adoption prior to M&A; continued maintenance for 5 years.

He defined Oracle’s product strategy by product categories as follows:

Development Tools:
S: Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle ADF, Oracle Enteprise Pack for Eclipse
C: Oracle Forms & Reports, BEA Workshop
M: BEA Beehive (old version, not the Open Source one)

Application Server and Transaction Processing:
S: BEA Tuxedo, BEA JRockit, Real Time, Liquid VM, BEA WebLogic Server (features integrated from OC4J), Oracle TopLink, Oracle Coherence
C: Oracle app server (OC4J)

Service-Oriented Architecture:
S: Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle Service Bus (Unifies ALSB and Oracle SB), Oracle BPEL Manager, Oracle CEP, Oracle BAM
C: BEA WLI, ALSB
M: BEA Cyclone & RFID Server

Business Process Management:
S: Oracle BPA Designer, BEA ALBPM, Oracle BPM (ALBPM & Oracle BPEL PM), Oracle Document Capture & Imaging, Oracle Business Rules, Oracle BAM, Oracle WebCenter (restricted use license)

Systems Management:
S: EM Provisioning Pack for Middleware, EM Configuration Pack for MW, EM Diagnostics Pack for MW, EM Management Pack for SOA Suite, EM Management Pack for Identity Management, EM Management Pack for BI

SOA Governance:
S: BEA AL Enterprise Repository, Oracle Service Registry, Oracle WS Manager, EM Service Level Management Pack, EM SOA Management Pack
M: BEA AL Services Manager (Systinet)

Enterprise 2.0 & Portals:
S: Oracle Universal CM, Oracle WebCenter Services, Oracle WebCenter Spaces & Suite, BEA Ensemble & Pathways
C: BEA WL Portal, BEA ALUI
M: Commerce Services & Collabra

Identity Management:
S: Oracle Directory Services, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Role Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Adaptive Access Manager, BEA AL-Enterprise Security, Oracle Identity Federation

Service Delivery Platform:
S: BEA WebLogic SIP Server, BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, Oracle Presence, Oracle Virtual PBX, Oracle Telephony Application, Oracle Unified User Profile
M: Oracle SIP Server

Mostly, this classification made sense to me and the result will, indeed, likely be Fusion rather than Confusion, but I did not understand the portal strategy: why is ALUI thrown into the Continue & Converge basket? In my understanding, BEA’s portal offering would be superior.

The BPM strategy also looks challenging and an immediate question arises about the integration between BPA and ALBPM. At lunch, one of Oracle’s representatives explained to me that there will be a BPMN export/import from BPA to ALBPM in the 11g release and that ALBPM engine will support BPEL, XPDL and BPMN 2.0.

In the end of the morning, Jaripetri Kalske of Oracle and Ari Pussinen of Oracle continued to assure the audience about the continuation of support, education, consulting, communities, partnerships and sales of BEA when it is being merged with Oracle.

I look forward to the combined Oracle/BEA evolving to #1 middleware player as it intends.