BEA Acquires Plumtree for $200M

As the market begins to heat up for the Fall frenzy, it looks like BEA got a jump on everyone else buy acquiring Plumtree yesterday for $200M.

Plumtree (www.plumtree.com) went public in June, in a tough IPO market, but last Wednesday, they got an unsolicited offer from Sutter Capital Management for $5/share ($2 cash, and $3 as a 5-year promisory note). Evidently this did not go over well with Plumtree shareholders.

Plumtree, is one of the portals CS has been tracking because it has good collaboration funcitonality built in, and is one of the only portal that does. The BEA (www.bea.com) offer, was a bit sweeter than Sutter Capital's at $5.50/share, and the deal should close this fall.

Since BEA already has a portal (WebLogic Portal Server) why would they want to buy another portal company? Does this mean the end of Plumtree?

In short, no, Plumtree will maintain it's brand (and portal) as will BEA and both will be sold by BEA. In addition, a combination product that merges the best of both ports will be available in a year or two. What this means is that some of the collaborative functionality from Plumtree and the ability to support both .Net and J2EE environments will be rolled into a future version of WebLogic. I think at that point (a year or two down the line) we will see the Plumtree brand begin to dissappear.

The Plumtree portal has been designed to make application building so easy that non-technical people can do it (kind of like putting Lego blocks together), whereas BEA's WebLogic Portal 8.1 is only J2EE-based and provides a full framework and lifecycle management. So in some sense Plumtree and WebLogic don't actually go after the same market.

In addition, Plumtree has many ways to connect to other ERP data, which is one of the stated initiatives of BEA ("think liquid").

What do you think of this acquistion?