A Fine Graft onto Good Rooting Stock – The Fruit Should Be Tasty

Even after two weeks, acquisition of the last of the pure-play enterprise portal vendors, Plumtree, is making news. The reason is obvious, unlike its two former rivals, Epicentric and Corechange, it was not taken by an Enterprise Content Management vendor (Vignette and Open Text in the case of the others), and rather it has been snapped up by BEA Systems, Inc. According to Mike Davis of Butler Group, this is the best fit of the lot.

He further goes on to say “this acquisition is not just an opportunity to buy market share, as BEA has itself also recently been seen as an acquisition target, with questions about its branding and direction being raised by financial, as well as IT analysts. The running of Plumtree’s operation as a business unit, and the exploitation of its Intellectual Property to add value to other BEA deployments will demonstrate whether BEA has the strength, and the ‘nous’ (just like Plumtree to this point), to go it alone, and remain independent.”