Denis’ Blog

In a previous post I’ve bet on HP buying BEA. After thinking SAP would. Oracle has just announced the acquisition of BEA. Am I going to loose another bet?

Not sure. The battle is not over. SAP Will have to move. If not, Oracle closes the door for a lot of Netveawer development. And HP if they want to take the last chance they have to come back in the Enterprise Software market

Moreover, not sure Oracle is not trying to buy BEA just to accelerate move from other. Think about the rationales behind Oracle announce. Of course with the acquisition of BEA, Oracle would have a real application server …but:

- they will have to kill one of the BPM tool (probably ALUI BPM Manager since Oracle Process Manager has some market share and is quite good).

- They have 3 portals in the portfolio: Oracle Portal + BEA Web Portal + BEA ALUI. Ok. The first one is a pure failure, the second one was a planned dead in BEA’s roadmap…

- In the SOA fields, they have 2 ESB, 2 Services Registry, etc…

4 Billions euros spent and a lot of cleaning to do…. I am really do not buying it….

Let’s see in the coming days. I still bet on HP.

BTW, once BEA is acquired, and after the BO/SAP deal…. Who’s left? What is the next bet we can do?
Cognos? For sure. Informatica? Maybe. Day.com? Too late. Red Hat? No, they still have too much momentum and good visibility. Montavista? Maybe. Open source pure players like MySQL or Alfresco? Too early.

Information Access vendors? Hmm… Not bad. Who will be the first? I think they will be public and in the top of the magic quadrant. Autonomy? Fast Search & Transfer? What do you think?

I’ve just noticed that Hasso Plattner, former founder of SAP AG, has invested in Mindquarry, a interesting open source collaboration solution. The open source market lakes a good collaboration, enterprise ready, solution. Mindquarry can be the missing link.

What amazed me is how fast young companies can build high end solutions:

- In the DMS space, Alfresco (and yes Jean-Thomas, Nuxeo 5 also)
- In the BI space, Pentaho
- In the Supervision and Datacenter Management, Hyperic, Groundwork or OpenQRM
- In the Collaboration space, XWiki
- In the CRM space, SugarCRM
- in the ERP world, OpenBravo
- in the VOIP space, Asterisk
- In the Virtualization Space, Xen
- In the collaboration & Enterprise 2.0 space Mindquarry and Zimbra
- In the Application Integration space Apache ServiceMix, Mule or PeTALS
- In the Portal space Liferay or eXoplatform
- etc, etc..

How can they manage to build so fast so complete solution ?

First, they leverage most of the time existing open source components like Hibernate, JackRabbit, Spring, Dojo Framework to accelerate and industrialize development. They can go faster to what is the key: advanced features and true innovation.

Second, and most important: They understood how to cooperate with a community, and they try to leverage that. Not sure all of them will succeed on the long run, and maybe some of them will leave one day or another the open source model. But it is not important. What is important, is that like the Internet accelerated the changes in the telecom industry, open source is accelerating the mutation of the whole IT industry. New pricing models, more for less. Promising. Exciting