Good question, but this is probably the last place you should look for the answer.
First up, this is an entrepreneurial company that identified "middleware" as a growing market. It put together a business plan that appealed to a VC, raised some cash, bought some "going concern" middleware from Novell, and some post-R&D stuff from Digital (ObjectBroker and DECmessageQ). They are financing both purchases from revenue flows, which appear to be mostly from the Tuxedo (ex-Novell) products. There is no doubt that their focus on this market has boosted Tuxedo sales, and that they are able to meet their payment schedules to both companies. Their competitors in this particular space include Top End and Encina.
They are continuing to develop Tuxedo, witness the swag of announcements recently:
beasys.com
Then there's the vision - i.e. why did they buy a CORBA ORB and messaging software from DEC to go with the transaction-oriented middleware? They presumably intend to glue all this together into a super-IDE, in which they present a complete set of development tools to major customers. This is becoming an increasingly crowded market. Oracle has a concept it calls NCA, Sybase has something remarkably similar called ACA, Borland has a thing it calls the Infonet (marketing stumbled a little on that one, I think) based on their acquisition of Visigenic - another ORB manufacturer - while Iona is still independent and pushing from below with an ORB-based offering that will become increasingly powerful. At the same time people like Forte, Progress and Unify all have more proprietary aspirations to the same space, as do other approaches such as Template (slab of industry-relevant 'template' code forms the foundation of major apps) and on through to the SAPs and Baans and Peoplesofts of the world (ERPs), who advocate full application outsourcing. My personal opinion is that BEA will be a competent but niche player in this particular game, and that they will continue to depend upon Tuxedo revenues for survival.
That's the customers and competitors in one paragraph. Can't help too much with the rest. Hope it helps.
david |
