News

BEA Acquires Theory Center and its Beans

• By Scott Bekker
• 11/15/1999

Under the terms of the agreement, BEA will pay approximately $100 million in stock and cash, and will integrate The Theory Center's executive management and staff of 42 into BEA's operations.

"This move is as strategic to BEA as the acquisition of WebLogic," says Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of BEA Systems. "This gives us the most advanced EJB components available for developing e-commerce applications."

The Theory Center's approximately 80-component catalog is strictly made up of EJB standards and includes components for customer relationship management (CRM), online order management, product catalogs with pluggable pricing, trouble ticket management and workflow management.

With the acquisition of The Theory Center, BEA is establishing a new office dedicated to the development of EJB components in Boston. "The Theory Center is the cornerstone of our e-commerce strategy," Coleman says. "We can now provide critical benefits such as time to market and the ability to build advanced technology for competitive advantage."

The components will be part of a separate product line BEA intends to announce next month. While the EJBs will support other application servers, Coleman says The Theory Center has been using WebLogic as the platform for EJBs since it is 100 percent pure Java. -- Brian Ploskina