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Technology Stocks : BEA Systems (BEAS) - Undiscovered Growth Stock -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Melissa McAuliffe who wrote (400)	2/15/1998 12:44:00 AM
From: Ed Bowes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2477

Hi Melissa, Et Al, Who's BEAS competitors? ... MSFT is everyone's competitor, eventually. BEAS is far ahead of MSFT in terms of it's middleware product, TUXEDO. TUXEDO rivals are as follows: 1.) CICS from IBM 2.) Encina from Transarc (now owned by IBM). 3.) TOP END from AT & T 4.) Entera / MIDAS from Borland International. * 5.) Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) *Borland International's MIDAS does not include a Transaction Processing (TP) monitor. BEAS TUXEDO leads the middleware market with 40%. IBM is second, but cannot seem to catch up (because, I beleive they are deemed as too proprietary). In fact IBM now licences BEA TUXEDO and ships it with their RISC UNIX Servers (as does DEC ... NOW DEC & COMPAQ). TUXEDO was invented in the early '80's and is in use by MA BELL (AT & T in cooperation with the baby bells) for much of our phone switching systems. It's only been in general commercial use since '89 and that was mostly through Novell. Since BEA came along in late 1995 / early 1996, it's been going gangbusters. My contacts in BEA systems tell me that they are, in fact, having to push revenue and sales forward into succeeding quarters just to keep up in terms of the accounting and the technical suuport (whenever they sell and deleiver TUXEDO, their techincal staff is overrun with questions on installation, configuration, proper use, etc.). The source of my information is close to Ed Scott inside BEA (the "E" in BEA). IBM will certainly be a threat of some kind. However, BEA seems to be setting themselves up to be bought. They have been getting quite cozy with Oracle over the last 18 months. In fact, Oracle's best benchmarks for OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) and general seek times have been accomplished when using TUXEDO. I can send you an Oracle document verifying this. At any rate, I've thought perhaps Oracle might buy them out and complete their concept of a trilogy for an enterprise information architecture: The NC client, TUXEDO as integrated middleware and TP montitor and, of course, Oracle as the database (resource manager). In competing with MSFT, this would stack against Windows 9X and NT on the client, MTS as the middleware and MS SQL Sever as the database. The only other company in this vertical market is IBM with OS/2 (and the next generation of operating system to be unleashed next year ... WOS .. Workplace Operating System), CICS and Encina as the middleware and DB/2 as the database (which has been gaining some ground lately). Anyway I've sliced it and diced it, I like BEA for their TUXEDO product. And not only that, but they have DEC's message queue (a very powerful transaction queing system developed over the last 6 years) now. They are also poineering and completing the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) standard, which competes with ActiveX and has the support of 200 companies in the Object Management Group (OMG) ... except for Microsoft, of course. BEA Systems has Netscape, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Unisys on their side. Microsoft has no one but themselves (which, often, is all they need). Borland International seems to have placed it's future with Microsoft's ActiveX Technology, but given it's now only a $225 million a year company (down from $500 million a year back in 1991), I don't see much trouble from them for BEAS. I look for BEA to merge or be bought out by one of MSFT's competitors eventually .... unless the giant MSFT makes an offer for them first, which is not entirely impossible. But if they don't get bought out, it will mean that they will have achieved a status and class of their own and still be a teriffic investment. Cheers! Ed.