BEA Looking In New Directions

Since then, Chuang has replaced Coleman's personable style and strategic skill with a more technology-focused and detailed approach. The timing was good, because BEA now has to protect its market-share lead in the Internet application server market from IBM, take aim at Microsoft .NET on the Web services front, and expand its portfolio beyond the WebLogic application server and into new frontiers. No small task, but Chuang is confident he's up to the job.

VB: With the new Java framework in WebLogic Workshop, it looks like BEA is challenging Microsoft's .NET Web services architecture. But Microsoft retains unilateral control over .NET, whereas the Java community is driven by a number of companies, possibly fragmenting the development and standards process. Does Microsoft have an advantage?
Chuang: There's one huge difference between an enterprise and a desktop business: No one in the enterprise selects just one vendor. Even if they do select one, they'll never say it. When you run a desktop, you're only going to use one vendor at a time. The switching costs on a desktop are very low, too. But that's just not how the enterprise works,how they purchase technology or operate. No company will ever say, "We're going to run only on .NET because it's Microsoft, and we're so willing to bend over for whatever they charge us and just hand over our IT budget to them." The other thing that's very important is that with the enterprise, by default, we have to deal with legacy systems. It's too complicated. No one can switch overnight to one set of technology. The enterprise has to be universal and open to different technologies.

VB: Are there any plans to expand outside of the middleware and Java development space and into applications?
Chuang: I look at this company by its strengths, which are its technology focus, its channel, its product development and culture. BEA has no room to play and no role in the vertical applications space. It requires a much more specialized channel than we have to be able to walk the walk. Nor do we have the expertise or culture to be able to walk into the financial services or telecom industries and start selling applications. The areas we are expanding BEA into are distributed data management, because we believe binding content with transactions in real-time is very critical; multichannel server, technology that allows any application to be used on any device; and applications management, which will put management of applications at the time you actually develop the application.

VB: How will the new Java technology, including WebLogic Workshop and JRockit Java Virtual Machine, affect BEA's channel growth and direction?
Chuang: For many of the channel partners that don't have access to a JVM implementation, this really does help. We're also attracting different types of consulting companies, like Ernst and Young and KPMG. They're focused on much higher-level application consulting. So before, without WebLogic Workshop on the high end and JVM on the low end, there were too many loose ends to deal with around Java applications. Now they can write very high-level code and deploy it in any kind of platform they want. So this gives a lot of our partners a much more extensive play in Java development and deployment. And if you look at ISVs, now they can get their software on more platforms and have more choices for high-performance deployment.