BEA draws on Java runtime skills against competition. (APP Dev News Review).

Times change and so must vendors. Once, for example, it was sufficient for an application server company to sell just that, an application server. Now you must offer what analyst Gartner Group calls an application platform suite, featuring portal and integration capabilities.

Purveyors of application development tools, meanwhile, could once get away selling an integrated development environment. Now, the IDE is viewed as commodity and must be enriched by tools providing design, collaboration, debugging and deployment features that are termed Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

Application server BEA Systems Inc has embarked upon a platform approach. The WebLogic Enterprise Server has been integrated with the company's Integration and Portal software, and Workshop Java web services development environment.

However, the line, it seems, has been drawn when it comes to tools. BEA's chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang appears unwilling to dance to the tools' industry's vogue for ALM, espoused by partner Borland Software Corp and the rival IBM's Rational business unit.

This despite intense, on-going speculation as to when, not if, BEA will buy Borland, an ALM apostle and number-one Java IDE vendor according to analysts.

Chuang told ComputerWire, during a recent interview, that BEA is a runtime company which provides tools for developers to abstract Java web services. An IDE, like Borland's JBuilder, in his book, is for the heavy work of code lifting and source-code management.

"We want to let people integrate. I think there will be a Borland forever. I don't want to be in the source code management business," Chuang said.

As such, Chuang insists BEA is out-of the pure ALM and Unified Modeling Language (UML) game. Borland and Rational are both using UML as a first step in their roads towards ALM.

"For people who need UML, they can choose between [Borland's] Togethersoft and Rational. Borland and IBM. We don't view UML as a critical part of our business. It's for viewing a process as a model," Chuang said.

However, Chuang does not put BEA entirely outside of the tools space and, as such, does not rule-out enriching BEA's WebLogic Workshop environment through the acquisition of certain companies or their intellectual property (IP).

BEA this year bought for an undisclosed sum the privately held CrossLogix Inc, whose flagship CrossLogix3 product provided a management tool for deploying security policy modeling based on Java Server Pages.

Chuang ruled-out acquisition of a large company on the grounds of "difficulty" and there being "no room for error". BEA is, though, "dabbling" with seven companies who may round-out Workshop or other parts of WebLogic Platform. BEA is in talks with a further 20. Such companies may find themselves eventually bought by BEA.

Acquisition and internal development will help BEA to innovate, staying ahead of the competition, Chuang said. Sun Microsystems Inc, Chuang's former employer, recently announced plans for a "visual" style Java development approach to its Sun ONE Studio tools. The company is expected to announce details at next month's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, California.

Chuang, though, dismisses Sun's potential to either emulate or challenge BEA on Java web services. BEA arguably set the pace when it came to simplifying development of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) when it acquired a bunch of ex-Microsoft employees at Crossgain. These people subsequently put their Visual Basic skill to work on Workshop, bringing drag-and-drop to J2EE programming.

"There's one big difference [between us and Sun]," Chuang claimed. "We have the Visual Basic guys. We have had them for a couple of years. They [Sun] are growing everything organically. We think Sun has to do both. Grow organically and acquire people who have prior experience... this is a people business. If you have all the right people, that counts."

Innovation will only get you so far, though and BEA's changing profile as a platform vendor means it is increasingly threatened by bigger, wellfunded rivals like IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp.

Analyst Gartner Group recently said WebLogic Enterprise Server 2002 market share slipped giving it a number-two position behind IBM's WebSphere that grew in 2002. Chuang insists forthcoming figures from IDC will paint a different picture, but IBM has the financial resources and global services to challenge BEA.

For Chuang, size and focus are important in BEA's struggle against IBM. BEA will appeal to customers on its heritage as a pure-play J2EE software vendor, appealing to both CEOs with the platform message and programmers through initiatives and tools for J2EE such as the subscription-based dev2dev network launched this year.

"IBM is an $85bn company. But I have to say, does the computer mouse really count? Does the LCD monitor really count? I'm not going to change how important IBM is... but we establish relationships at the top while getting the religious adoption from the bottom with developers," Chuang said.

Microsoft is another matter, one that once, apparently, kept Chuang and BEA sweating about how they would survive.

Chuang now believes that customer references and a growing set of healthy financials will help to persuade those who question BEA's potential as a sound investment for their IT dollars against the 28-year-old Microsoft.

"There's not one single moment I don't think about Microsoft," Chuang said. "It's because they have proliferation. You have to use success to prove that people can leverage the technology and build successfully. That's ultimately the reference point."