History
BEA began as a software company, founded in 1995 and headquartered in San Jose, California. It grew to have 78 offices worldwide at the time of its acquisition by Oracle.
The company's name is an acronym of the first names of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. All were former employees of Sun Microsystems, and launched the business in 1995 by acquiring Information Management and Independence Technologies. These firms were the largest resellers of Tuxedo, a distributed transaction management system sold by Novell. BEA soon acquired the Tuxedo product itself, and went on to acquire other middleware companies and products, including ObjectBroker and NCR's Top End product.
In 1998, BEA acquired the San Francisco start-up WebLogic, which had built the first standards-based Java application server. WebLogic's application server became the impetus for the Sun Microsystems' J2EE specification and formed the basis of BEA's WebLogic application server sold today.
In 2005, BEA launched a new brand identity with the slogan "Think Liquid". BEA also announced a new product line called AquaLogic, which is an infrastructure software family for service-oriented architecture (SOA). The same year, it made its entrance into telecommunications infrastructure through the acquisition of Incomit, a Swedish telecommunications software provider. In late 2005 the company announced the acquisitions of Compoze Software, a provider of collaboration software, M7, an Eclipse-based tools company, and SolarMetric, editors of the Kodo persistence engine.
The acquisitions continued in 2006 with Plumtree Software, an enterprise portal company; Fuego, a business process management (BPM) software company; and Flashline, a metadata repository company. These acquisitions have since become parts of the AquaLogic SOA product stack.
On October 12, 2007, Oracle announced their intent to buy BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. As a result of the offer, BEA's stock price rose over five dollars upon the opening of trading for the day. BEA turned the offer down the same day, saying that the company is "worth substantially more". On January 16, 2008 Oracle signed a definite agreement to buy BEA for $8.5 billion. It is believed that Carl Icahn, one of the company's most prominent shareholders, was the main reason that the deal happened.
On April 29, 2008 Oracle completed its acquisition of BEA . As of 2008, Alfred Chuang is still with the company.
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