Sun in denial...
Sun Denies Reported Plan To Take Aim At BEA
(03/29/01, 6:30 p.m. ET) Reuters
NEW YORK—The shares BEA Systems Inc. tumbled for a second day in a row Tuesday on fears that demand for company's application servers would be hurt by Sun Microsystems Inc.'s reported plan to bundle its own server into its Solaris operating system.
But a Sun (stock: SUNW) executive denied the report and said the server giant had no plans to give its iPlanet application server away for free.
Following several analyst reports concerning the reported plan, BEA's stock hit a new 52-week low of $22 3/8 earlier in the day. The shares managed to climb back and close at $26 3/16, down 13/16, or about 3 percent.
BEA (stock: BEAS) shares had already fallen 20 percent Wednesday after SG Cowen analyst Rehan Syed said a trade magazine report suggested Sun is considering bundling its iPlanet application server into its version of its Unix operating system, Solaris.
Such a move, Syed said, could hurt BEA in the near term, but he doubted it would affect the company much in the long term because Sun's product is not as good as BEA's.
For the past year, Sun has bundled some software programmers can use to develop an application using iPlanet. But the company did not include the more important production license.
"We're not announcing anything like we're embedding it or giving a production license away for free," said Andy Ingram, vice president of Solaris software marketing. "It's not true."
The application server connects apps that create the site features customers see, with the back-end information—the databases and the transaction capability—which often reside either on a gaggle of servers or on a mainframe.
BEA's WebLogic application server is known for its ability to run on any operating system. BEA has had a close relationship with Sun, IBM Corp.'s rival in the server market.
techweb.com |
