Breathless hyperbole
Maybe it's because I'm British. Or maybe it's a broader thing - is anyone else getting really fed up with quotes in vendor press releases that fall over themselves to be the most
super-super-excited (thanks James) they can be?
So today BEA announced that it has completed the acquisition of BPM technology specialist
Fuego. By the way, I think it's a sound move for both companies - with the usual MWD caveat that when it comes to
BEA's acquisitions, it's important to think about how easy it will be for BEA to convince its customers that their existing investments in portal/process management technology aren't quite enough...
But here's what made me write this post: a quote in the
news release attributed to CEO/Chairman Alfred Chuang:
"We are systematically targeting the fastest growing segments of the red-hot SOA software market," stated Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. "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."
Let's look at that quote again.:
"We are systematically targeting the fastest growing segments of the red-hot SOA software market"
BPM is not part of the SOA market. You can do BPM without SOA, and you can do SOA without BPM. BPM is a fast-growing segment of the enterprise software market - fair enough - but please don't try to position BPM as part of SOA to make it more sexy.
"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."
Come on Alfred. A unified platform? You're telling us that the Fuego and Plumtree products all share common development, runtime and operational environments with the rest of the BEA middleware portfolio?
BEA is making some sound moves and it really does have significant capabilities to help organisations with SOA initiatives (see
our in-depth report on BEA's service infrastructure offering). But it owes it to itself and to its customers to be smarter and cooler about the way it communicates.
