Plumtree becomes AquaLogic User Interaction
When BEA announced its planned acquisition of Plumtree, I
commented that the company's justification omitted what I felt was an important factor underlying its $200 million investment:
"
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."
Well, it seems I was right. With the closure of the acquisition on Thursday BEA announced that Plumtree's portal will be sold and marketed as
BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, which the company positions as "
a new, integrated family of AquaLogic™ products used to create enterprise portals, collaborative communities and composite applications, all built on a Service Infrastructure." Whilst this is a necessary move by BEA, given that the user interaction component of the AquaLogic portfolio was an acknowledged gap, the company is still going to have its work cut out to clarify how it relates to the WebLogic Portal and to extend the
Swiss characteristics of the Plumtree product to the remainder of the AquaLogic products.
