Double-edged blessings
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The drive to create a Web community is only one area where BEA can potentially
be thwarted by well-heeled competition. But that goes with being at the
top of the enterprise software hill.
As the firm's Dietzen bemusedly puts it: "We are blessed with large and talented competitors."
In the past, competitor Oracle, in particular, turned very caustic and
dismissive as it publicly cited benchmark and other data that called BEA's technical leadership
into question.
At JavaOne in 2001, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison spent a share of his keynote needling and pestering BEA on such points. At the time, company head Bill Coleman quickly
countered that Ellison's data was largely invented.
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»1. Behind
BEA's tool bet
»2. New focus on
tools
»3. Double-Edged
blessings
»4. Reliability
key
»5. Colorado county
user
»6. Analyst gauges
tool move
»7. NCFE opts for WebLogic
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Today, BEA's Dietzen asserts that Oracle's biggest challenge is in the application
business. That is not a business BEA competes in, although the firm has seen important
placements of its app servers in PeopleSoft and other ERP and CRM environments.
Like others, Dietzen contends that Oracle "throws in the application server"
as part of a bigger database or applications deal, but he is not concerned that
in itself will be a long-term problem for BEA's sales efforts as, these days,
"even Oracle has to improve revenue streams."
IBM has also been willing to engage in benchmark battles and some "BEA bashing."
But a measured IBM view on threats to BEA's tools outlook comes from Rod Smith,
distinguished engineer and VP of emerging technologies in IBM's Software Group.
According to Smith, despite its big moves in tools, "BEA has to work on the
breadth and depth of its tool coverage."
Chuang and company might counter that the deals forged with Borland and Rational
will help meet this need. Smith's likely counterpoint might be that the IBM-sponsored
Eclipse.org group would provide the most open means to extend tools. WebGain,
the struggling independent tools company backed by BEA, is listed as an Eclipse.org
member, but BEA itself is not affiliated with Eclipse.org.
Sun on the horizon
BEA's relationship with Java-originator Sun Microsystems has
been especially complex. Many WebLogic app server implementations sit atop the
Sun Solaris OS running on Sun hardware, which has benefited both companies. Along
with IBM, BEA is a prominent Sun Java licensee. But after having ended its complex
joint application server marketing relationship with AOL, Sun has made recent
moves to renew its flagging iPlanet app server alternative. Gartner's Natis lists
declining cooperation by Sun as one of BEA's upcoming strategic challenges.
But Natis, like others, somewhat plays down the threat of the "free"
bundling of Solaris and iPlanet recently announced by Sun. On one level, app servers
are becoming a commodity, but the effects should not be overstated. As enterprise
application servers take on ever greater loads, require clustering and stick around
long enough to need updating, viewers note, the importance of free app servers
that amount to bare-bone loss leaders will diminish.
As BEA's Dietzen points out, the company is not only saddled with big competitors,
it also has some big alliances. One watched of late concerns Hewlett-Packard.
The two companies had a significant early marketing relationship that diminished
as HP bought its own application server in the form of Bluestone. In the wake
of HP's merger with Compaq, the future of HP's Bluestone middleware has been placed
in question by its own executives. That added to the interest when HP and BEA
in July announced new plans to jointly sell integrated software, hardware and
services solutions featuring WebLogic on HP OSs.
Behind HP's move may be some hardware platform politics. The company gave up its
own chip-making efforts to work with Intel on the Itanium processor, just coming
to computer rooms after many years on the drawing board. One of BEA's biggest
allies is in fact Intel, which hopes to unseat Sun Solaris and IBM AIX hardware
servers using Itanium and its follow-ons as the means. BEA has expended considerable
effort and expense to make next-generation applications run fast on Intel hardware.
Intel and BEA's partnership was on display earlier this year when BEA purchased
Sweden's Appeal Virtual Machines, makers of the JRockit Java Virtual Machine.
Intel also took a role in that deal, although those financial details are, as
yet, undisclosed. JRockit is a server-side JVM that must deal with lots of I/O;
it is said to address issues raised by Microsoft's retreat from "Wintel"
JVMs.
"JRockit will bring outstanding performance for WebLogic applications on
Intel 32-bit, 64-bit and other architectures," said BEA's Chuang. "WebLogic
and JRockit fill a void left by Microsoft when they abandoned the JVM."
Said Gartner's Natis: "JRockit is a promising item. It could establish BEA
as the leading provider of the Java runtime on Windows. That would be a great
opportunity for a new marketspace for BEA."
Paying cost to be boss
BEA has been quickly forced into the role of big league player. But it has
not proved shy about driving change. More barbs will come its way. Its WebLogic
Workshop offering especially will come in for arrows from competitors that challenge
whether it is truly standard Java. While BEA has tried to create a way of abstracting
complexity without disrupting standard Java, Workshop must rely on useful, callable
BEA-created components for handling some common but difficult Java programming
tasks. In the loosely knit Java community, that is usually an ingredient for
controversy.
For now, notes Gartner's Natis, "users must accept a proprietary level of
coding, and a proprietary level of logic that works only with Workshop."
BEA has placed its Workshop-related extensions for consideration as part of the
Java Community Process (JCP), but it will be a while before the prospects of those
efforts are clear. In the long term, BEA must hope JCP will accept its now-proprietary
extensions. "Here, people must now accept on faith that BEA will do well,"
said Natis.
Among the other things that must go right for BEA to further flourish: The new
computing paradigm of Web services must flourish. "If Web services are a
fad, than that's a problem," said BEA Workshop steward Nielsen.
As well, the company must do an excellent job of building out its developer communications
infrastructure. At the same time, BEA has to continue to grow its channel business
Having reached nearly $1 billion in yearly revenue, said Gartner's Natis, BEA
is a vendor at a crossroads. Getting to higher revenues will be difficult. BEA
comes to its present position with some brave plans that, at the very least, help
to make the software business interesting. In the end, corporate application managers
and programmers will decide, as ever, if the products live up to the promise.