The vision of BEA's founders has always been bigger than middleware. Their goal from the beginning was to provide a comprehensive infrastructure for development and deployment of reliable, salable business applications for e-commerce. As the Internet Economy has profoundly transformed the business landscape, BEA too has transformed itself to better serve its business customers by offering the E-commerce Transaction Platform. Key Dates:
BEA Systems, Inc. is founded by Bill Coleman, Ed Scott, and Alfred Chuang.
BEA Systems, Inc. is a company that is right in the middle of the burgeoning electronic commerce (e-commerce) marketplace. Originally established in 1995 to provide 'middleware,' a type of platform software, to corporate clients who were switching from mainframe computing to distributed client-server systems, BEA developed a family of software and servers to support high-volume e-commerce transactions in real time. Toward the end of 1999 the company repositioned itself as 'The E-Commerce Transactions Company.'
BEA Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 by Bill Coleman, Ed Scott, and Alfred Chuang. All three held management or executive positions with Sun Microsystems Inc. before founding BEA Systems, which was named using the first letter of the first name of each of the three founders. Coleman became BEA's chairman and CEO. Scott was in charge of BEA's sales and marketing and served as president and, later, counselor for the company. Chuang would hold a variety of positions at BEA, including chief technology officer, chief operations officer, and president. The New York-based venture capital firm E.M. Warburg, Pincus & Co. invested $50 million for a half-interest in the company.
BEA was established to fill a niche called 'middleware.' Middleware is a form of platform software. At the time BEA came into being, mainframe computing was giving way to a client-server environment. In the client-server environment, each client and each server have an operating system, typically Windows for the client and Unix for the server. Middleware was a solution to the problem of how to have applications run on multiple machines. Middleware acts as an operating system in the client-server environment, so that applications can run on the middleware platform.
Rather than inventing platform software from scratch, BEA was interested in a product known as Tuxedo, an online transaction processing monitor. The original program for Tuxedo was developed by Bell Labs in 1983 to enable large numbers of users to simultaneously access and manipulate a database on a mainframe computer. It was then sold to Novell Inc., with variations developed by other smaller companies. In 1996 BEA bought the rights to Tuxedo from Novell, along with much of its independent distribution network. Novell retained ownership of Tuxedo, but BEA would take over development and distribution of the product. Also included in the deal were the core of Novell's Tuxedo business team, including engineers and programmers who developed Tuxedo, and existing contracts and agreements.
By all accounts Tuxedo had been languishing under Novell, but BEA quickly announced a new suite of products for the fall of 1996. Transaction processing (TP) monitors were beginning to attract the attention of corporate information system buyers as a key component of electronic commerce. BEA also produced a Java interface called BEA Jolt, which extended Tuxedo transaction processing to the Internet. By translating between Tuxedo and Java applets, BEA Jolt would permit any Java-enabled browser or Java program to access the Tuxedo middleware. With Jolt, Tuxedo users could perform transactions with any Java-enabled browser or stand-alone Java application.
By maintaining a continuous transaction state, Jolt would enable electronic commerce to be conducted in real time. In 1996 electronic commerce was limited to placing orders that were processed offline. Jolt also enabled financial applications to be extended
