Sun Microsystems is to acquire SeeBeyond Technology for
$387m (£209m) to strengthen its position in the service-oriented
architecture (SOA) market.
An SOA allows users to build infrastructures that can react more
quickly to changes in the business climate, and makes sure they get
the required applications in the most efficient way using web
services.
SeeBeyond has sales of $167m and around 2,000 existing customers
in the SOA market, mainly for platform integration solutions.
The products, services and solutions currently offered by Sun
and SeeBeyond are complementary, with little overlap, according to
the two companies.
SeeBeyond’s Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN)
suite enables back-office integration, business-to-business
integration, business process management and business
monitoring.
With SeeBeyond, Sun plans to extend its Java Enterprise System
platform by creating the Sun Java System Integration Suite to ease
the development and roll-out of SOA-based enterprise
applications.
The acquisition will allow Sun to compete more effectively
against big SOA players such as IBM and BEA.