BEA Systems Inc told us its next acquisition would be strategic, and so it has turned out to be. As expected (CI No 3,101), Digital Equipment Corp yesterday announced it will sell key distributed object and messaging technologies to the 1995 Sunnyvale, California-based middleware start-up and take a undisclosed stake in the company, the size of which it says could become significant over time. Tim Yeaton, director of strategic planning for DEC’s Unix business segment says the opportunity BEA offered to advance DEC’s OTM object transaction middleware strategy was more important than the cash it will receive for the products, which are the ObjectBroker request broker, asynchronous DECmessageQ technology and some related software including DEC Desktop Connection. Terms of the deal mean DEC becomes a BEA VAR and will resell Unix and NT versions of the BEA Tuxedo OLTP monitor, as well as an OpenVMS version of the BEA will supply to it, plus the object and messaging products which BEA will re- brand under its own name once the deal completes. DEC will pay royalties to BEA and says it will continue to develop and enhance the messaging and object products for its Alpha RISC system customers. Around a quarter of DEC’s Unix middleware development group is being offered work by BEA under the deal, some 75 engineers, which is separate to DEC’s Unix clustering, operating and system software development team. Employees at DEC’s Nashua, New Hampshire-based ObjectBroker and Hartford, Connecticut-based DECmessageQ teams will be re-located in a new BEA facility the company will establish no further than 20 miles from each town. ObjectBroker is closely aligned with Microsoft Corp’s Distributed COM object model, and is now also compatible with Object Management Group’s Corba 2.0 distributed object mechanism. DEC’s Microsoft and Corba development teams are separate and the Maynarder will retain its Redmond technologists to continue and extend interoperability between its products and Microsoft’s ActiveX object model, Falcon messaging and other middleware technologies. DEC says it will continue to provide its ACMS Transaction Processing monitor – now based on IBM/Transarc Encina – to OpenVMS users, as well the Transarc’s CICS/6000 implementation for DEC Unix and VISystems’ CICS-compatible VIS/TP monitor. BEA says it will Corba-enable Tuxedo using ObjectBroker during 1997, claiming the integration will enable object and Tuxedo TP services to interoperate using IIOP. BEA will also integrate DECmessageQ with Tuxedo and ObjectBroker, which will provide asynchronous, store and forward inter-application message queuing to both environments. BEA will continue to offer the products as discreet technologies as well as part of an integrated environment and also plans to introduce a graphical management interface in March that will enable administrators to manage BEA middleware from a variety of system and network management environments including HP OpenView, IBM NetView and the Tivoili Management Environment. Closure of the deal awaits US government approval.
