Lombardi lures Fuego customers after BEA takeover

Hot on the heels of BEA Systems’ acquisition of business process management (BPM) specialist Fuego, BPM rival Lombardi Software has launched a migration programme to poach Fuego customers concerned by the deal.

Lombardi said in a statement that its MyPath initiative would offer Fuego users "special commercial terms" to migrate to its TeamWorks process management suite. It added that this would allow them to avoid any corporate changes experienced at Fuego.

Lombardi said the offer could particularly appeal to Fuego customers who work with BEA's rival middleware vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Derek Miers, chief executive of BPM research and consulting company Enix Consulting, welcomed the programme and hinted that Fuego customers could see instability as a result of the BEA deal.

"Consolidation in the BPM market is clearly picking up speed - with Tibco acquiring Staffware, Metastorm swallowing CommerceQuest, and now BEA snapping up Fuego," said Miers. "But these sorts of technology acquisitions are never as easy as they first seem."

However, BEA said it had worked closely with Fuego in the past, so it should have few problems integrating Fuego's technology into its own AquaLogic family of service-oriented architecture (SOA) products.