Plumtree Acquisition

With the recent acquisition of Plumtree by BEA there's been much talk about how this will affect Plumtree and its users and partners...

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Why would a portal company buy a Portal?

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Plumtree will maintain it's brand (and portal) as will BEA and both will be sold by BEA. In addition, a combination product that merges the best of both ports will be available in a year or two. What this means is that some of the collaborative functionality from Plumtree and the ability to support both .Net and J2EE environments will be rolled into a future version of Weblogic. I think at that point (a year or two down the line) we will see the Plumtree brand begin to dissappear.

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BEA's Plumtree buy adds missing piece to SOA plan

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No company is more bullish on SOA than BEA. The problem is that BEA's Weblogic application server -- long the company's flagship product -- is really a Java platform, whereas an SOA is supposed to maintain platform neutrality. Hence BEA's platform-agnostic Aqualogic middleware, which shipped in early August, and BEA's surprise acquisition last week of Plumtree Software

But Forrester analyst John Rymer, who follows the space closely, said Plumtree's portal will be "the UI" of BEA's Aqualogic suite, which includes an ESB (enterprise service bus), data integrator, application security

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What the BEA/Plumtree merger means for Web portal futures

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you can begin to see why this merger is so important. BEA's J2EE-based Weblogic Portal, which the company describes as transactional, targets companies developing transactional portals in a J2EE application development environment. Meanwhile, Plumtree's product suite, which includes a portal designed for non-technical business users and includes related products for collaboration, search, analytics, and content management, has a platform that supports both J2EE and .Net-based application servers.

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BEA-Plumtree Challenges

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There's also an underlying strategic issue, with Murphy saying that Plumtree was already between a rock and a hard place. "The rock is the strategic infrastructure aspect of portal frameworks, which Microsoft and IBM tend to dominate; the hard place is the enterprise application portal, which SAP and Oracle dominate."

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BEA & Plumtree: The M&A Q&A

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the really interesting one from where I sit is whether or not Plumtree's business-savvy DNA will be overwritten by its acuirer's strongly technical culture, or whether or not BEA can practice some recombination on-the-fly and apply some of the Plumtree lessons to other areas of its business, like the aforementined SOA product set.

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Why BEA bought Plumtree

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So why not partner with Plumtree to fill the collaborative portal hole in AquaLogic, rather than acquire? The most compelling reason was to make sure no one else got there first... The other attraction of Plumtree was that it has a successful track record of pitching and appealing to business analysts and users as well IT infrastructure people.

Who will buy BEA?

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If all that talk at BEAWorld about thawing frozen assets leaves you cold, here are some hot tips on who's most likely to warm things up by liquefying BEA's own assets in a takeover bid

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See Also: Portals | Plum Tree | Notes Index

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