Oracle Closes  BEA Deal

April 29, 2008

Oracle has received approval of the European Commission and subsequently completed its acquisition of BEA Systems.

"The addition of BEA will accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure," said Oracle President Charles Phillips. "Together, Oracle and BEA will provide a series of complementary and well-engineered middleware products, allowing customers to more easily build, deploy, and manage applications in a secure environment."

Separately,  BEA Systems has made a major release of its BEA AquaLogic User Interaction suite of products, including new versions of BEA AquaLogic Interaction, BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration and BEA AquaLogic Analytics. As more and more enterprises seek to enhance existing portal deployments and stale intranets with Web 2.0 capabilities, these new releases are designed to help companies deliver innovative new workplace strategies via BEA’s cross-platform web suite. With the new BEA AquaLogic User Interaction release, customers can create richer, more interactive profile pages, deliver infinitely customizable user experiences and multi-channel interfaces, leverage full RSS capabilities, and enable dynamic human networks to create social applications that enhance worker productivity, group collaboration and community innovation.

The March of Dimes, the leading nonprofit organization for pregnancy and baby health, selected BEA AquaLogic User Interaction as an organization-wide framework for its employees, partners and end-users to create and share information in the pursuit of improving the health of newborns and infants.

“Today, we are embracing new innovations in portal, collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies to help us achieve our mission of improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality,” said Paul Tominsky, director of enterprise portal/knowledge management at March of Dimes. “By empowering our employees, volunteers, educators, outreach workers and advocates with greater control and flexibility over how information in our organization is used and shared through our portal platform, we hope to achieve a more active user community, and improved collaboration and sharing of enterprise knowledge through the deployment of BEA AquaLogic® User Interaction.”

American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the nation's leading nonprofit health organization providing diabetes research, information and advocacy. It selected BEA AquaLogic User Interaction to help provide a readily accessible, cross-functional platform for capturing, finding and sharing information and services through the Web that staff and volunteers need to do their job and fulfill the ADA mission.

“ADA initially deployed its portal, MyADA, to 900 staff nationwide in 2006. After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, we were ready to begin adopting these principles in the enterprise,” said Rob Cork, director, internal and volunteer communications at American Diabetes Association. “Portals tend to be the leading vehicles for the implementation of Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing because of their rich user interface and interactive capabilities. We are in our initial planning stages and will use BEA AquaLogic User Interaction as the starting point for our foray into MyADA 2.0 for our staff and volunteers.”

The new release of BEA AquaLogic Interaction 6.5 delivers the industry’s first full-fledged social computing platform, with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business – project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems - that are often shared inefficiently through e-mail. The release also introduces improved usability designed to empower knowledge workers to more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a highly flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools.