Oracle and BEA: The road ahead...

Probably no other news has created waves like the news of Oracle acquiring BEA for $8.5 billion in April has done. In a recent web conference, Oracle president Charles Phillips and Oracle Fusion Middleware Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian covered product plans in the SOA, development tools, identity management and other middleware spaces.


Taking cue from what Oracle had to say, it plans to categorize BEA products into three areas:

1. Strategic products : These will be adopted immediately with limited re-design into the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform.
2. Continue and converge products : These are BEA products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Fusion Middleware. These products will continue to be developed and maintained for at least nine years.
3. Maintenance products : These are the ones that BEA had put on an end-of-life status and will get continued maintenance for five years.

Kurian has promised that BEA customers will not need to make forced migrations on account of this acquisition. Customers who are already using BEA products will not have much of a haggle in terms of new licensing, and will continue to recieve maintainance support.

Oracle shall move in the direction of using BEA WebLogic server as the OC4J container. Oracle Service Registry will serve as a UDDI-compliant registry to publish and register services.

The Oracle Data Integration product continues as Oracle's entry in data integration and Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides SOA service orchestration. For event processing, BEA's Weblogic Event Server will be merged with Oracle Complex Event Processor.

Oracle also plans to strengthen BEA's Tuxedo transaction processing software. Tuxedo is geared for C, C++, and Cobol applications as well as customers looking to migrate off of mainframes.

In business process management, the Oracle BPA (Business Process Analysis) designer will be converged with BEA Aqualogic BPM Designer on a common BPM and BPEL-compliant metadata model to move information between these two tools.

So far as development tools are concerned, Oracle will continue with JDeveloper as its integrated toolset.

Oracle Technology Network, the developer's resource, will merge with BEA Dev2Dev and BEA Arch2Arch programs for developers and architects to provide homogenous repository of resources.