BEA Extends WebLogic With Telco Buy

Looking to improve the service delivery capabilities in WebLogic, BEA
Systems has acquired Incomit, a privately held
maker of infrastructure software for telecommunications businesses.

BEA did not make terms of the deal public but said in a statement
it will use Incomit’s technology to pad the WebLogic Service
DeliveryPlatform, BEA’s application server software for telcos.

By acquiring Incomit, BEA hopes to provide value to the telco
industry, which has had several challenges brought on by mergers
and acquisitions and decreasing voice revenues, said Olivier Helleboid, executive vice
president of corporate strategy and development at BEA.

Helleboid said the fact that carriers are increasingly providing
services, such as e-mail, gaming and various other types of digital
content, means they will require additional technological support that the WebLogic
platform can provide.

BEA, which derived nearly a quarter of its 2004 revenues from
telcos, has some experience in providing software for carriers. Tuxedo, its first telco product, remains the e-commerce
middleware of choice for many service providers since BEA acquired it from Bell Labs a
decade ago.

The San Jose, Calif., software maker hopes the buy will give it an
advantage over rival IBM, which also looks for placement among telcos
with its WebSphere Application Server. BEA also competes with Sun Microsystems and
open source purveyor JBoss in the application server space, where speedy, reliable
run times are used to judge the quality of the software.

Application server vendors are largely pinning their hopes on
making money from service-oriented architectures , distributed
computing models that allow customers to save money by reusing
assets, such as code.

BEA is no exception. The company has a number
of SOA and Web service-related projects on tap for 2005.