Oracle outlines BEA plans

No forced migrations, promises the enterprise software giant

Oracle this week outlined its roadmap for the technologies it acquired with the £4.3m purchase of BEA Systems earlier this year, repeatedly reassuring the middleware vendor's customers that there would be no forced product migrations.

The enterprise software giant explained that middleware is the fastest growing area of its business and that its strategy in this space would follow the same principles of producing "hot-pluggable, pre-integrated and complete" products.

"It's not just another acquisition for us," said Oracle president Charles Phillips. "We've been investing in middleware for years and it's fundamental to how we look at our business in the next few years in terms of the foundation of our growth … there will be no forced product migrations."

Oracle senior vice president for development, Thomas Kurian, said strategic products such as BEA's WebLogic application server require very little rearchitecture and will be adopted rapidly into Oracle's Fusion Middleware offerings.

On the developer side, Oracle said its focus would be on the Oracle JDeveloper integrated development environment, with capabilities in BEA's Workshop developer tool integrated into a new Oracle Eclipse Pack.