There was a pretty interesting article last week from The Register. In a somewhat over-dramatically titled article, “BEA AquaLogic SOA business dismantled”, they shared some anonymously-sourced information on Oracle’s plans for BEA.
The Register has learned from individuals close to the company that BEA’s new owner Oracle is merging the AquaLogic and WebLogic professional service teams. Oracle is also splitting the AquaLogic products between “web products” – user interaction, collaboration and the Web 2.0 suite – and AquaLogic business process management (BPM).
So no big surprises there, merging the professional services for Web and AquaLogic makes a great deal of sense(shouldn’t BEA have done that already??). And the “splitting” of Web Products and BPM probably just means those products are being aligned with similar groups within Oracle.
What really got my attention though was:
It is understood the web products may be taken over by the Oracle team running Stellent content management, acquired by Oracle in November 2006
So the UCM team might get AquaLogic? Wow, that’s a bit of a surprise. I personally had not given AquaLogic’s future a lot of thought, figuring their product teams would continue to operate as normal much as Stellent’s did. There’s of course a big “may” in that quote though, for all we know officially they could be getting ready to launch SQL Developer Web 2.0 Portal.
It’s a little funny for me actually as one of the first Stellent projects was actually a Stellent/PlumTree implementation. At the time they were both relatively smaller companies with some pretty cool ideas and applications. It’s crazy that they could become part of the same product line now. Amazing how quickly things change.
Oracle Universal Content Portal?
With that little tid-bit comes the game of what-ifs. I’m actually working on a project right now using both ALUI and UCM/Site Studio, so this news has really peeked my interest. Up until now I’ve more or less figured that the BEA applications would become part of Fusion-Middleware, probably joining forces with their Oracle counterparts. Oracle has made it pretty clear that they intend on developing integrations for all applications within the middleware stack, but if AquaLogic becomes a part of UCM could we expect a more unified solution?
Could ALUI become the new presentation layer for UCM? For Site Studio? We’re probably a little way out from hearing, much less seeing anything, but I’m actually pretty excited about the BEA buy now.
