BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS), and Plumtree Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLUM), today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which BEA will acquire Plumtree for approximately USD$200 million in cash. Plumtree Software provides enterprise portal solutions to connect disparate work groups, IT systems and business processes. Its portfolio features the industry’s only cross-platform portal, running on both J2EE and .Net. By combining the Plumtree and BEA portal portfolios, BEA will be able to better provide customers with improved enterprise productivity by offering both collaborative and transactional portals across multiple platforms and application servers.
“The Portal is becoming the major point of integration in the enterprise,” said Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive officer, BEA Systems, Inc. “Customers will benefit from the powerful combination of BEA as the leader in portal, application and service infrastructure, and Plumtree, as the leader in portal and collaboration software. The acquisition of the Plumtree portfolio will make BEA the leading provider of the most open, extensible and standards-based J2EE, .Net and Service-Oriented platform in the industry.”
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Interesting move. Both BEA and Plumtree were quite stroingly positioned in Gartners Magic Quadrant for Horzontal Portals (check my earlier post).