Oracle Purchases Collaxa, Launches Oracle BPEL Process Manager

June 30th, 2004 by Mark Rittman

"A
couple weeks back, we brought word that Oracle planned to make a JavaOne splash
by acquiring Collaxa and that is exactly what the company has done today. Oracle
has secured Collaxa’s business process management software for an undisclosed
sum. The deal has seen Collaxa’s BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
Server product turn into Oracle BPEL Process Manager overnight. The new software
is being sold either as an add-on to Oracle Application Server 10g for $10,000
or as a standalone product for $30,000."
reports
Ashlee Vance for The Register.

Collaxa is a very
well respected
startup based just down the road from Redwood Shores and is run by Edwin
Khodabakchian, former CTO of AOL’s eCommerce division. What Oracle are getting
out of this is Collaxa’s business process management tools, which will now be
sold as a Oracle
BPEL Process Manager, an add-on for Application Server 10g, or available as
a standalone product for use with other J2EE application servers. According to

Rochelle Garner from CRN:

"Oracle on Tuesday stepped up its services-oriented
architecture efforts the easiest way possible. It bought the underlying
technology, the product and company operations of business process management
(BPM) pure-play, Collaxa.

Terms of the acquisition for the privately held business process
management vendor were not disclosed. Both companies are based in Redwood
Shores, Calif.

As of Tuesday, Collaxa’s BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) Server
will be sold as Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager. The software is available as a
$10,000 option for Oracle Application Server 10g, or as a $30,000 standalone.
Both are priced per CPU.

Collaxa, and now Oracle, claim the business process management server is the
only native BPEL production engine available. That "native" adjective is
important because it enables processes written and monitored on Oracle BPEL
Process Manager to run on any J2EE-compliant application server.

Other vendors, such as BEA Systems and SAP, have announced plans to support
native BPEL in their integration software, but those products have not been
released."


BPEL is

defined as "an XML-based language designed to enable task-sharing for a
distributed computing or

grid computing environment - even across multiple organizations - using a
combination of

Web services. Written by developers from BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft,
BPEL combines and replaces IBM’s WebServices Flow Language (WSFL) and
Microsoft’s XLANG specification. (BPEL is also sometimes identified as BPELWS or
BPEL4WS.)" and Collaxa’s BPEL server and developer tools are generally seen
as being the ‘best of breed’ in this new market sector.

Oracle
purchasing Collaxa is a bit of a coup, as it allows them to jump ahead of SAP
and BEA who are only just starting to introduce BPEL functionality into their
servers. According to the CRN article, "There’s a higher level of business
process management and monitoring with Collaxa than with typical BPM," said Rob
Cheng, product marketing director, Oracle Application Server and Tools. "This
was a real opportunity to bring BPM into the data center of enterprise
customers."

This of course isn’t the first aquisition Oracle have made to beef-up their
Application Server offering, with close to twenty of HP’s old
Bluestone
developers being recruited last year to build up Oracle’s XML handling
capabilities.

According to Ashlee Vance again for The Register:

"When HP’s ill-fated Bluestone adventure ended last year, a number of
investigators in the industry went in search of the application server IP and
developers. Oracle and HP had engaged in talks over the Bluestone assets, but
a deal was never completed. Time passed, and the Bluestone crew was forgotten.
Oracle has since picked up some of the ex-Bluestone team, paying particular
attention to the group’s XML tool experts. "When they were available, we took
advantage of that," said John Magee, vice president of Oracle9i Application
Server marketing. "We set up an office in New Jersey for about twenty of
them."

However there are conflicting noises coming out of Oracle about XML and web
services:

""Oracle would be interested in bulking up its XML handling capabilities
and tools," Governor said. "This is a critical area in the middleware war
against BEA, IBM and Microsoft. So far none of these vendors "owns" the XML
tool market, so it is very likely Oracle is investing in this area as a
potential differentiator. Oracle9i Developer Suite is already a powerful
environment for Java and model-based development, which stands comparison with
offerings from the likes of IBM and Borland. So XML is a potential
differentiator."

"Oracle tends to be a little conflicted when it comes to XML and Web
Services," he said. "Larry Ellison still argues strongly that the only way to
deliver interoperable applications is to base them on a common data model and
architecture. XML on the other hand, is associated with broader notions of
interoperability based on API standardization, business document parsing,
message passing, and just in time translation. It is intriguing therefore that
the XML project is placed in New Jersey, about as far from the Redwood Shores
campus as the U.S. continent allows"

Last
word again to Ashlee Vance. "It could be a bit embarrassing for Sun
Microsystems when Oracle announces the news at Sun’s JavaOne show. Sun has been
trying for years to regain share against IBM and BEA in the app server market
and has so far failed to do so. Oracle, on the other hand, has made steady
gains. At last check, IDC showed Oracle holding 19 percent market share in app
server revenue behind IBM’s 29 percent share and BEA’s 26 percent share. Sun was
still in a holding pattern at 3.5 percent share."

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