BEA to acquire Plumtree
Yesterday BEA announced its intention to acquire Plumtree, the last of the significant pure-play portal vendors, for approximately $200 million. BEA claims that the acquisition makes sense for a number of reasons. First, Plumtree adds collaborative portal capabilities to complement the transactional capabilities of its WebLogic Portal. Second, it adds .NET support. Third, it brings expertise in vertical markets – retail, CPG, manufacturing and local government – and so has the potential to extend BEA’s customer base. Finally, it allows BEA to target line-of-business decision makers as well as its traditional IT buyers. On the face of it, all very sensible but I am not convinced that all of BEA's claims are justified. On July 19, BEA completed the acquisition of Compoze Software, to “offer portal customers direct, seamless, standards-based integration of email, calendaring, and task list functionality from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. Compoze Software also enables portal customers to easily integrate Instant Messaging applications from Yahoo!, Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communication Server, as well as the ability to incorporate threaded discussions and group “white-boarding” to any portal”. So, the company had already taken steps to add collaborative capabilities to WebLogic Portal. In our recent analysis of BEA’s service infrastructure proposition we highlight that one of the challenges the company faces is dealing with replicated capabilities within its portfolio. This acquisition adds to that challenge. I am also less than convinced when it comes to the new customer opportunities. Certainly, Plumtree exposes BEA to vertical markets where it has not achieved the same levels of penetration as it has in financial services and telecoms and, by virtue of Plumtree’s application-centric, as opposed to infrastructure-centric, portal proposition to a different target audience. However, it seems likely that a significant proportion of these new opportunities are .NET environments (and where they aren’t one would presume that BEA would have already been considered as a J2EE platform provider) and BEA is not yet, as our analysis shows, in a position to offer a credible multi-platform proposition. Not forgetting of course, that Plumtree’s total revenues for the last financial year were $84 million – less than a third of BEA’s revenues for its most recent quarter!It seems to me, leading on from my previous point, that this acquisition is about what BEA’s VP of product marketing referred to as the company’s goal “to be the Switzerland of software” and break away from its Java-centric roots. This is core element of its new AquaLogic platform proposition. Whilst this acquisition, assuming it is completed successfully in the autumn as BEA hopes, will allow the company to claim support for .NET as a runtime platform, in reality it is only for one component of its portfolio and BEA will still have a lot of work to do if its neutral stance is to have credence. John Kunze, the CEO of Plumtree, discussed composite applications as part of his contribution to the announcement. Whilst this did not figure as prominently in terms of the justification for the acquisition, I can’t help thinking that this is also significant. When BEA announced AquaLogic the company emphasised a shift away from application development through coding to service composition and even talked of an AquaLogic ‘Composer’ for use by non-developers. But it remains just that – talk – and the company currently relies on its existing WebLogic Integration and Portal products to compose services into higher level integration processes which, together with data and information services provided by the AquaLogic Data Services Platform, can be accessed by users. The acquisition of Plumtree will bolster BEA’s capabilities here, particularly in terms of reducing the reliance on developers but, as with the multi-platform proposition, there is still work to do.So, all in all, the proposed acquisition has some merits. However, it remains to be seen whether it will provide the boost to revenue and market share that BEA hopes and the company still has work to do when it comes to its platform neutral AquaLogic proposition
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