Thursday, 7 July 2005

Sun's SeeBeyond Acquisition

SeeBeyond, a compatriot of webMethods, Tibco, and other enterprise application integration (EAI) players, has been acquired by Sun for almost USD 400 million, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Financially speaking, the deal isn't in the same league with Sun's USD 4.1 billion buyout of StorageTek, but it has similar strategic importance. Both deals are about giving Sun more play in different, higher-margin, higher growth infrastructure categories of e-business.

Sun's legacy expertise is high-end servers, but market pressure and changing technology have made this a difficult segment in which to keep sales and profits up. A research note from Gartner explains that the acquisition will fill a hole in Sun's story. "Without a complete integration solution, Sun's Java Enterprise System (JES) was incomplete and Sun was unable to deliver consistently on its message of providing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) stack."