BEA Is on Fuego (AMR Research)

BEA Systems has acquired the privately held business process management (BPM) vendor Fuego for $87.5M. BEA expects to retain all but about 1% of the Fuego staff. Fuego boasts 170 customers, which are all referenceable, in a number of verticals, but is strongest in financial services and telecommunications. The Fuego product will be rebranded as the Aqualogic Business Service Integration platform.

Fuego CEO Jon Lauck boasted about not losing a deal to IBM or TIBCO in more than 12 months. This success plus the BPM platform, which provides stronger modeling and orchestration geared toward business analysts, are likely motivations for the deal.

In addition to IBM and TIBCO, BEA increasingly competes with the likes of Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft on selling the broader service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform. It is also critical to sell the platform abilities not only to the IT organization, but also to the business owners and analysts that will play important roles in defining composite applications.

BEA had BPM as part of its Weblogic Integration product, but the interface for the tool was Weblogic Workshop, which is clearly geared toward a developer/architect role, not a business analyst one. It remains to be seen whether the Fuego acquisition will be enough to give BEA the platform it needs to compete against these much larger companies, but this is clearly an important acquisition for BEA to try and keep pace.

© Copyright 2006 by AMR Research, Inc.