The deal would immediately extend the range of BEA infrastructure to integrate RFID and other device data across the enterprise, BEA said. By adding the functionality of ConnecTerra’s software, BEA hopes to have an end-to-end RFID software offering.

The acquisition, announced at BEA’s user conference in London, in effect answers others like SAP, Oracle and Sun, which already offer middleware to help customers make sense of large amounts of data from RFID systems.

The J2EE platform has not really been extended into the real-time space, so we see a number of interesting opportunities as we get closer to being able to have a deterministic platform, said BEA chief marketing officer Marge Breya, on a conference call. That is, being able to guarantee we have sub-40 millisecond latency, maybe even down to 10 millisecond latency at some point in time.

ConnecTerra is a 28-person firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that combines the usual data-filtering engine with features that provide management of EPC-standard RFID product codes.

Though small, the almost five-year-old company is one of the leading RFID middleware players, with roughly five to ten major customers among its 25-strong client roster from across the retail, consumer product goods and transportation industries. BEA said the two companies share some customers, but declined to specify.

ConnecTerra has an existing partnership with Cisco Systems to embed its software into an upcoming Cisco offering as part of its application-oriented networking initiative.

Privately-held ConnecTerra also plays a prominent role in the RFID standards world, with CTO Ken Traub being one of three vendor members of the EPCglobal working group that oversees all EPC standards.

ConnecTerra also is a co-inventor of the first EPCglobal-ratified RFID software standard called Application Level Events, or ALE, which is an interface for filtering and collation of RFID-generated data.

The acquisition comes as no great surprise to the RFID industry, which has been expecting a shakeout in the crowded middleware space as offerings from smaller players, such as ConnecTerra, overlap those from large enterprise companies, such as SAP. Other notable independent RFID middleware companies include GlobeRanger and OATSystems.

In acquiring ConnecTerra, BEA is gaining a company that it is already pretty familiar with, having worked on at least three of ConnecTerra’s deals. What really drove us was our customers who really wanted us to find somebody in this space, said Bill Roth, vice president of product marketing, who is currently transitioning to shepherding the recent M7 development tools acquisition.

RFID will join BEA’s recent list of vertical solutions, which also include employee self-service, customer self-service, telco solution delivery and institutional trade management.

BEA is not disclosing terms of the deal for the tiny firm, but claims it is small enough so as not to make much of a dent in the company’s financials. With the deal closed, BEA plans to release the initial product of the acquisition in its financial Q4, which begins in November.