BEA

As concern grows over BEA, chief looks for new products

Looking for new areas of revenue, infrastructure software company BEA Systems intends to introduce a new set of products, according to the company's CEO.

BEA's second-quarter earnings, which the company reported on Thursday, exceeded analysts estimates but did not allay concerns about the company.

The infrastructure software company said its revenues were $365 million in the quarter but did not report earnings because of an ongoing review of its accounting. Services revenue was up, but its license revenue was down 9 percent.

Financial analysts said the consistent license revenue slide has raised concerns about the company's competitive … Read more

JBoss founder proclaims open-source purity

JBoss Chief Executive Marc Fleury isn't commenting on reports that Oracle plans to acquire his company, but the outspoken exec has published remarks in his blog that indicate there could be serious philosophical incompatibilities between the companies.

Specifically, JBoss' priority on open-source software (OSS) might not fit well with Oracle's proprietary products, judging by Fleury's view.

"JBoss has always been about pure open source. We started in OSS and we will die in OSS," Fleury said Tuesday on his blog.

In his blog, he singled out rivals IBM and BEA Systems with criticisms of appropriating … Read more

BEA found JBoss acquisition too expensive

Oracle and JBoss haven't commented on a BusinessWeek report that the database giant is acquiring the open-source Java application server specialist--but a rival of both companies has confirmed that JBoss has been on the market.

BEA Systems, which sells application server software of its own, decided against acquiring JBoss when presented with the opportunity, said Chief Marketing Officer Marge Breya in an interview Friday. One significant problem was the price was too high, and another was that BEA didn't like JBoss' open-source practices.

"JBoss has been shopping itself around for months," Breya said, during which BEA … Read more

Former exec challenges Sun over profit margins

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos faced familiar skepticism Wednesday about the profit margins of Sun's business--but this time it was from Bill Coleman, a former Sun executive and business partner who now is chief executive and co-founder of Cassatt.

Coleman oversaw Sun's move from its SunOS operating system to its current Solaris product in the early 1990s, then founded BEA Systems, which sells software to let servers run Java programs. Now he's in charge of Cassatt, which sells software designed to automatically move programs among a group of servers so data centers work smoothly … Read more

Sun exec questions BEA's Bare Metal Java

SAN FRANCISCO--BEA Systems announced a technology this week called Bare Metal designed to give Java programs a speed boost by running them directly on computer hardware rather than atop an operating system. But in a meeting with reporters at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference here, Sun's software chief technology officer raised questions about the wisdom of the idea.

Hal Stern, appointed to the software CTO post in May, said that operating systems are very useful part of a stack of technologies from the processor at the base to applications at the highest level. In that that technology stack, operating systems … Read more