BEA to acquire Plumtree
Last week BEA announced a definitive agreement to acquire Plumtree. Both companies have portal portfolios, which are among the most significant in the market. BEA's WebLogic Portal is considered more of a development framework, while Plumtree offers a more out-of-the-box portal product. There will be execution challenges in this acquisition, with Plumtree just recently moving to J2EE while most of their customers remain on Microsoft .NET platforms. Whether the latter group will want to switch or BEA will strive to support them remains to be seen. Internationally BEA is significantly stronger than Plumtree and it might be BEA's strong international sales force that effectively determines the fate of the Plumtree products. This acquisition aside, the portal market remains and open and immature -- and particularly the area of CMS and portal integration continues to cause pain for customers.