Plumtree acquisition marks the end of an era

A lot of speculation and analysis is going on this deal. With the acquisition of Plumtree in a $200 million cash deal, BEA Systems has plucked the last remaining pure-play vendor from the portal market. Butler Group says that with Plumtree in its offering, 2005 would be the year BEA joined Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in the "Outperform" category of the portal market.

TechWeb says that “BEA is a year behind Plumtree on the .Net side; this acquisition collapses the time line of getting that value to market.” With the portal becoming the point of integration with the enterprise BEA needed this to get out of their bread-and-butter JAVA alignment.

Internet News says that with pure players taking a beating in the last couple of years it was pretty evident that Plumtree would be picked up by a giant.

And Peter Abrahams at it-analysis.com has summed it up right;

1. Both sides are successful companies.


2. The overlap in functionality is small enough not to be an encumbrance to the integration of the Plumtree product line into BEA.


3. Plumtree comes with .Net expertise which BEA needs in order to provide a complete solution to their customers.


4. Plumtree also comes with a greater bias towards the business user rather than developer and BEA has begun to move in that direction as well.


5. Enterprises have been moving towards SOA and are keen to purchase as much of the solution from one vendor as possible. The inclusion of Plumtree in the BEA portfolio makes that much easier.