Since BEA was acquired by Oracle, there have been many changes that affected the BEA products. Now that Oracle has had time to develop their product strategy, I wanted to shed some light on how BEA products have fared. I suggest reviewing the presentation that goes through this in detail because visuals make it easier to understand, but here is a short summary.
- ALUI Portal (formerly Plumtree) is now Oracle’s web portal platform of choice
- ALSB has won out as the service bus of choice
- ALBPM will be combined with the Oracle BPEL product into a suite that will support both products. The new suite includes Oracle BAM, Oracle Business Rules and Oracle WebCenter (ALUI Portal license for use only with BPM engine) at no extra cost (as of this writing).
- WebLogic Server has become Oracle’s application server of choice
What does all this mean? In my view, Oracle has shown a commitment to leverage the best-of-breed of the BEA products by integrating them into their middleware tier. Oracle has selected to keep WebLogic, ALUI, ALSB and JRockit as their strategic choice products moving forward.
Oracle is combining the strengths of ALBPM (human interaction strengths) and BPEL (automated workflow strengths) into one seamlessly integrated complete BPM solution suite. This all means the BEA legacy products will be supported for a very long time, and that is good news.