BEA Tops $1 Billion

BEA Systems had its first billion-dollar year in fiscal 2003, company executives said Thursday.

BEA, San Jose, Calif., posted $1.01 billion in revenue for the year ended Jan. 31, 2004, an 8 percent increase from $934 million the previous year. Income was up 41 percent to $118.7 million over the same period.

In its fourth quarter, the company earned $39.3 million, up 12 percent from $35 million the prior year, on sales of $278.1 million, up from $249.3 million the prior year.

The company beat Thomson Financial/First Call consensus analyst estimates for the quarter by 1 cent, posting a profit of 10 cents per share.

In 2003 BEA introduced WebLogic Platform 8.1, a major update to its WebLogic suite of software and the first time the application server, portal, integration server and WebLogic Workshop Java tool were rolled into a unified platform.Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang on a conference call Thursday said he was happy with how 8.1 was performing in the market so far, especially since the products were not fully available until last summer. BEA reported license revenue for the quarter of $143.1 million, up 12 percent from $128.2 million in the third quarter.

In particular, Chuang said BEA has made some inroads in the hotly contested integration software space with WebLogic Integration, which he called BEA's "fastest-growing product." BEA did $30 million in WebLogic Integration revenue for the quarter and more than $100 million for the year, he said.

BEA, which forged its position as the leading Java application server vendor in 2000 with WebLogic Server, unveiled efforts to take on the integration market in late 2002. Chuang said he would not be satisfied until BEA takes an industry-leading market-share position in the integration software market.

While BEA's products remained strong in the market, the company's channel efforts still seem somewhat stalled. Last year BEA was criticized by solution providers for turning away from the channel as the company did away with its internal channel organization, opting instead to turn partner efforts to the sales organization led by Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales Charlie Ill, a former IBM executive.

On the teleconference Thursday, Chuang said BEA was focusing on adding about 100 new sales representatives to bolster direct-sales efforts and would continue to shore up channel efforts with BEA's three main partners, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Accenture.BEA's top executive did not mention any new channel plans to work with regional and boutique solution providers, but did say BEA is continuing its plans to work with value-added distributors. BEA currently does not have any U.S. distributors, but works with about 40 distributors overseas. And last year BEA added Logicalis as a VAR in the central United States, with the ability to resell BEA's entire product line.

Elizabeth Montalbano is an editor for CRN.