Acquisition of the Week update from June 2005

Today's peek into the shopping cart of large ISVs takes us to California, where early (VERY EARLY for me) this morning Sun Microsystems announced its intention to acquire integration and SOA vendor See Beyond. The acquisition of See Beyond at a mere $387 MILLION in cash (I want to see where Scott McNealy was hiding that wad of cash as he shopped around) will bring Sun's integration and SOA story into line with competitors BEA Systems and IBM as well as competitive offerings from Oracle. While See Beyond's integration technology will definitely benefit Sun's Java Enterprise System software, the bigger story here is the acquisition of a more mature SOA framework. Coming on the heels of BEA's announcement of its SOA offering, AquaLogic, this acquisition will certain turbo-charge Sun's current SOA offerings, which are less mature than its competitors.The race is definitely on as platform vendors seek to enhance their current SOA story with acquisitions and new offerings, and we expect that this is not the last we'll hear in the SOA space in terms of acquisitions, mergers and partnerships as platform vendors vie for a piece of the SOA pie.