BEA Systems Buys Software Maker Fuego

BEA Systems Inc. on Wednesday said it has acquired Fuego Inc., a business process management software maker expected to expand BEA's infrastructure products for building service-oriented architectures.

BEA, based in San Jose, Calif., said it paid $87.5 million in cash for the Plano, Texas, company, plus certain retention and performance bonuses.

Fuego's software for automating business processes would become a part of BEA's AquaLogic product family and serve as the foundation for the AquaLogic Business Service Interaction product line.

In general, AquaLogic products provide the infrastructure for SOAs, a form of loosely coupled application integration that takes functions within enterprise applications and organizes them into an automated business process. An SOA uses standards based on extensible markup language.

"The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments," Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive of BEA, said in a statement.Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said the acquisition made sense because BEA's existing tools for business process management did not provide strong support for SOAs.

"Their existing process tooling wasn't particularly service-oriented, and service-oriented processes are clearly on the AquaLogic roadmap," Bloomberg said in an email.

The problem BEA will face in integrating Fuego into Aqualogic will be in taking the latter company's code-generating approach to business process management and make it work in the BEA product.

"BEA has some work to do to make sure the Fuego technology fits into the Aqualogic service infrastructure," the analyst said.

A plus, however, is that both companies' technologies are "firmly in the Java camp," Bloomberg said.Fuego, founded in 1999, has more than 100 employees. Its customers include Southwest Airlines, United Healthcare, JPMorganChase and British Petroleum, BEA said.