You guys who claim JBOSS or Tomcat is better than BEA must be penny programmer who does 1 or 2 page worth of JSP for your project and dare to claim expertise in J2EE already. Get a real job! Stop bashing the real deal app server and stop praising open source app server that can do very little and has the scalability of 10 concurrent users only.

When stock is cheap that is when to buy!

Most people that dont understand markets buy when stock is expensive cause then they feel "safe" and they sell when stock is cheap because they feel at "risk". BEA prices will start going up tomorrow, buy now if you can, I did.

Watch the USA press today.

End of the day today, Tuesday already and no one bought BEA yet! They are 40% off of their regular low price for God''s sake. No one thinks its a steal at these bargain basement prices?

What''s up with that?

Maybe tomorrow. If BEA does not get matched with a buyer tomorrow, then I give up. They will never get bought! Do they still think BEAS will get even lower? Who knows.

Boogyman who bought BEA?

I will watch your news tomorrow. :-))

Amen

BEA gave the world the application server, then they gave the world the application platform and tomorrow they will give the world something that will revolutionise Java and bring it to the masses!

Watch the press....

Long live BEA!!!

>The fact is that Alfred has been a better CEO than 99% of all CEO''s in existence.

ROFLMAO!!!!

>In fact, let''s see how many of you can name another company that went from 0 to a billion dollars in such a short period of time....

The fact is that Bill Coleman was in charge when BEA was formed, and Bill Coleman was still in charge when BEA became a billion dollar company!

Alfred took over, decided to put ALL BEA''s eggs in the Java/J2EE basket, and that strategy has failed!!!

WebLogic Platform 8, (Alfred''s baby) is basically dead on arrival, it''s sales have actually DECLINED the last three quarters. That is a failure my friend, nothing else.

I''ve worked under both Coleman and Alfred, Alfred doesn''t come close to Coleman. He''s an engineer and has NO business running a company. He should be replaced, and I predict he will be replaced shortly!!

Oh,and by the way....

TOLD YA!!!!

You know you guys are the stupidest most pathetic bunch of idiotic weasels I''ve ever had the displeasure to meet.

How dare you say that B, E or A has NOT been successful, or doesn''t know how to run a company? How many billion dollar companies have you formed??? ANSWER: NONE In fact, I doubt any of you could run a small McDonald''s. Sheesh!!

What a bunch of losers you are.

The fact is that Alfred has been a better CEO than 99% of all CEO''s in existence. In fact, let''s see how many of you can name another company that went from 0 to a billion dollars in such a short period of time.... yep.. didn''t think I''d hear a response out of you... morons.

Let''s make it easy, as soon as you can put together a half-billion dollar company in 5 years, you may come back and post insults... until then, sit back and let the big boys do their thing... ok??

Alfred NEEDS to sell the company or BEAS needs a new leader! He is not getting the job done!

Can BEA survive against IBM? Give me a break, they will never see IBM in their rear view mirror again. BUT, now they see Oracle in their rear view (despite their lame assertions that they don''t). The real question is "can they survive against Oracle" - which is undoubtedly the database underneath the large majority of their installs. Microsoft is still operating on a largely obstacle free non java parallel path, so no stopping them. But Oracle...that spells big trouble for the BEA gang. The fight with big blue is over, and if they aren''t careful, the fight with big red could be their undoing.

Can anyone please tell me:

1- How Gartner came up with those figures?
2- Where I can find this report on the Gartner site?
3- How can Gartner put Microsoft in 3rd place in the Enterprise Application Server Magic Quadrant?

Based on the installed base, revenue, amount of servers, quantity sold and any other mesurable criteria Microsoft should be in first place.

"For those of you who are crying about the "misleading graphic": Give me a break! You are saying that the graphic is showing the 2003 results skewed against BEA -making it look dwarfed compared to WebSphere? Take a look at the 2001 results! Will you now agree that those results look unfairly skewed against WebSphere, that BEA dwarfs IBM? Anyone that looks at the graph for two seconds can understand that it is not misleading."

Looks like they updated the graph this morning to 0 to 50 scale but does not look any better, what else?

It is interesting to see that IBM is gaining share in the market however I am not sure that badging all software products produced by the company (including MQ Series) as WebSphere counts as a share in the "app server" market.

I am disappointed that this kind of sensationalism is used because if BEA Tuxedo were considered, then the picture may be slightly different.

i am not sure who or what is bringing BEA down but seems unlikely to be journalism: 4 ouit of the 5 research firms listed here by Yahoo Finance recommended a downgrade on May 14 after their quarterly earnings report.

The graph for the last 3 mnths tells its own story

Although I think it does sounds reasonable that IBM is starting to take a bit of the lead on the App Server Market, I find it very interesting that Sys-Con is constantly trying to bring BEA down, just after the announcement by BEA to move their WebLogic magazine to another publisher. Personally, it lowers the value of Sys-Con''s publications with me and my developer team. It was nicer seeing an unbiased opinion.

first is Carly at $3.8B (she wants it cheap after splurging for Compaq).

Larry comes in for $4.2B.

The Bill wants crossgain back and offers $5B.

SUNW will have to use its $6B to even have a chance!

MY PREDICTION IS THAT SUN WILL BUY BEAS

MSFT is another potential buyer. Crossgain was founded by MSFT geeks and was successfull. BEAS bought Crossgain and successfully integrated the company. I''d be surprised if MSFT does not want a part of them back! Besides, BEAS would be a solid addition to the MSFT arsenal should Linux eventually take off in the next 2-5 years.

I will never forget his motivational speach to the sales force a few years ago. he said something like, "All of you must kick some ass and have fun". He must have been refering to management kicking the sales force''s ass...and working there was definately no fun! They turn over the sales force every year. Not a good use of money in my opinion.

BEAS is going to be the building infrastructure having to do with all future technological improvements in Homeland Security. While there''s a host of MILLION DOLLAR CONTRACTS being handed out everyday, there''s one very special major MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR contract I''m waiting for to be announced "ANYDAY NOW". BEAS is going to get a nice chunk of contract work after it''s announced. It does not matter who the MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR contract goes too. Fact of the matter is it''s due out at anytime. Somebody should be smart and definitely jump on the BEAS buyout bandwagon and make a decent offer before this contract is announced. I wouldn''t be surprised if Big $$$ days are ahead for BEAS. ORCL and IBM are right now licking their chops over BEAS right now. What''s going to happen is one morning we will either see this stock open up many dollars higher due to a bid for purchase offer or, OUT OF THE BLUE, all of a sudden BEAS is suddenly handed all these milions of dollars in Homeland Security contract and subcontract work. BEAS can''t be avoided.

***EVERYBODY SHOULD BE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THIS AMAZING OPPORTUNITY TO BUY SHARES AT THIS ''NEVER-TO-BE-SEEN-AGAIN'' SUPER LOW SHAREPRICE DUE TO THE WEAK-HAND BRAIN-DEAD RETARDS WHO SOLD IN THE AFTERHOURS SESSION!!***

I found out about more rumors from a reliable source close to BEA since I wrote my first posting. Rumor has it that BEA wins a number of Reader''s choice awards from Sys-con last December.

JDJ puts Alfred on the cover of its January issue. One of the JDJ staff members get copied on an internal BEA email accidentally which they find its content disrespectful and offensive. JDJ publisher privately emails Alfred and asks for an apology for the language. Alfred shows him the finger.

Then JDJ publishes an editorial in its March issue without mentioning Alfred''s name and preaches to him.

http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=43873&DE=1

Alfred gets pissed off and sends his new v.p. of developer marketing programs he hired from MS to Sys-con offices to new york.

They take a picture together but JDJ still does not get an apology from Alfred.

http://www.sys-con.com/pastVisitors.cfm

On Thursday, April 22 JDJ publishes a story and asks the question "How long can BEA surive against IBM?" The next day BEA stock tanks 7 percent.

This Thursday JDJ reports on the 2003 Gartner market share in this story, two hours after the story goes live, BEA announces their quarterly earnings and they miss their target. The stock tanks another 22%.

JDJ industry newsletter said on its May 3rd edition:

"JDJ will publish the name of the "Success, Arrogance, Rise and Fall" CEO, and the photo of his new executive who lacks competency in decision making. Please see pp. 56 - 57 in the May print edition for more..."

I checked the digital edition pdf file and these two pages are blacked out. Has anyone seen if they really published this story in the May print issue?

OK Niel.Thanks for all the links. But look at the following facts
==
Feeling Blue
Last week, it was pointed out that IBM''s software execs were shut out of a portion of their 2003 bonuses because of lackluster sales growth. Smith Barney software analyst Tom Berquist, who tracks IBM''s software performance relative to the companies he covers, estimates that Big Blue''s software sales grew only 1% after accounting for foreign-exchange gains. And he agreed with us that the bulk of that came from IBM''s Rational software outfit, which it acquired in 2003.

The upshot: What little organic growth there was in the company''s middleware business was generated by mainframe-based software, which is not exactly an emerging growth business. Which makes us wonder how IBM manages to claim major market-share wins in such areas as database (its product is called DB2) and application servers (WebSphere).

Berquist points out that IBM reported that WebSphere, which competes directly with BEA Systems'' WebLogic software, was up 10% for the fourth quarter. But a closer look at the numbers, Berquist says, indicates little change from previous quarters wherever the two companies compete head-to-head.

"IBM in most cases bundles software with mainframe sales, [and thus] it is likely that most -- if not all -- of WebSphere''s growth is on the mainframe side," Berquist notes.

BEA doesn''t target mainframe customers. As a result, Berquist contends that BEA remains the leader in application server software for the more-important desktop network market. This contradicts various claims by IBM, which are supported by independent industry research outfits (Plugged In, Jan. 20, 2003).

Berquist also believes that the same practices are applied by IBM to its DB2 database software, which competes directly with Oracle products. The Redwood Shores-based software giant has raised arguments similar to those of BEA regarding IBM''s murky software sales reporting and market-share claims (Plugged In, Jan. 27, 2003).

Accuracy and transparency in reporting software sales figures is critical because independent industry-research outfits rely on these numbers to calculate their highly influential market-share data, which in turn is plugged into stock-valuation models by brokerage analysts on the Street.

This will continue to be an important and controversial issue as software becomes increasingly more important to Big Blue. While software sales growth may have sputtered, it is still highly profitable, with gross margins of 87% -- by far the fattest in the company.

For IBM Chief Executive Sam Palmisano to usher in another era of double-digit growth, he is likely to focus on increasing software revenues. And, historically, that means shopping for more software lines to add to the company''s portfolio.

While it is often suggested that IBM buys software companies in order to drive the consulting and services business, it is actually the software businesses themselves that offer the biggest payoff. Thus, it is not surprising to hear from investment bankers that IBM is busy kicking the tires of software concerns and will possibly make a deal or two before the end of the year.

==

4 points:
(1) Weblogic 6.x really was rather weak, but 8.1 has made lots of leaps. For those bashers, you should try the 8.1 before shouting out loud.

(2) Of course, if you''re talking about jboss which doesn''t cost anything, what d''you expect? You don''t need to pay, so as long as you get a reasonable product, you''re happy. But if you are to pay, you expect it to sing and dance.

(3) Re websphere, we all know how sneaky IBM is bundling zillion number of products and still calls it websphere. Hardly anyone is fooled, except those so-called analysts (Wall St, Gartner, and the like). What do they know anyway? I always find those so-called analyst reports next to junk.

(4) And this is the saddest part: Most everyone ignored those analyst reports, except the CIO''s, execs and Wall St who don''t a thing about the technologies, but who is making the big decision. Last but not least, CIO''s just want a bigger company so they can sue if their ass are on the line. What would they care about superior products?

My $0.02.

I aggree with Andrew Wolfe''s comments on the misleading graph. It''s a poor job on JDJ part, that in order to make a point you use deceit. In the future I will read everything from JDJ with a little less trust. Edward Tufte (Yale professor and author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information") would have a field-day with this graph.

Aside from BEA and IBM the report attempts to imply 31% in the "others" category. Independent industry analysis shows that JBOSS owns 24% to 27% of that. How is that not important and why was it not mentioned? Is the goal of the article to inform or to concoct some artificial metric called "commercial" and report on "commercial" application servers? What they mean by "commercial" is not that the products are used for industrial commercial purposes but rather than you paid a large sum for the product. Highly misleading an a real disservice to readers in my opinion.

Sai, don''t kill the messenger. JDJ just scooped the news three weeks ago, they did not publish the Gartner numbers, they are just reporting it. So is the rest of the news agencies. Did you take a look at Google technology news this morning?

CNBC just reported that they are losing to IBM.

http://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journalid=21186671&brk=1

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5210844.html

http://www.cbronline.com/currentnews/a8539ccc24e9318d80256e930032e1d7

http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=50086

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20040512S0011

http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/applications/0,39001094,39179149,00.htm

Do you think the entire world has a reason to be vindictive against BEA?

Read these facts.
==
It is simply amazing that IBM can get Gartner to publish rubbish like this. Consider the following:
Every year Sam Palmisano, IBM''s CEO, rates each IBM division on a scale from 1-20 (20 is good). The rating determines how much bonus compensation each employee of that division receives for the year (e.g. a rating of 20 means that they get 100% of their annual bonuses, a 12, 60%, etc.) In 2003, for the first time in HISTORY, an IBM division got a zero rating (meaning zero bonuses). The division: IBM Software! So, you do the math: The IBM division responsible for WebSphere sales TANKS during a year that the overall application server market was down 8% and picks up market share? Who are they trying to fool?
This was not the first negative thing coming from from JDJ in recent weeks, and I assure you that it will not be the last. Until a few months ago, JDJ had BEA''s publishing contract, which they lost to a competitor (the way that, in the real, world WebSphere consistently loses against WebLogic). They are not happy and have proven to be pretty vindictive about it.
When IBM gets desperate, they just spend more money with the analyst community, attempting to spin the market. So, to stop your head from spinning, please take a look at the recent analysis, below

BEA is getting squeezed. IBM eats their lunch at the top of the market, the most complex customers with the biggest most complex applications. BEA doesn''t even have a mainframe based software. IBM''s technology is NOT the equal of BEA, but it is close and gaining. BEA is getting squeezed out of their lower end market by the free JBoss which is rapidly gaining traction, by Oracle which is giving away their app server for free to OEM partners, and SAP which is entering the fray. Folks, these are tough competitors especially when you no longer have a significant technology lead...

BEA''s management is doing everything they can to keep the stock price up to prevent an aquisition. They re-org several times a year...RIF people several times a year. Their management hasn''t put together a cohesive direction since coleman left. There is a ton of political infighting amongst BEA execs. This is to be expected given the different philosophies they must have (execs from Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Start Ups).

The non-growth of license revenue spells danger for BEA. Sure the months of Feb-April are tough on everyone. But with BEA''s quarter being skewed by one month, that puts their next quarter at May-July. Talk about tough. Ever try to sell anyone anything in July?? Its a dead month with vacations, no compelling budget events... Picture trying to increase license revenue after eating into their backlog of deals in this past quarter...when they effectivly have only 2/3rds a quarter to do it in.

Not saying it isn''t possible...again, their technology is good. But it isn''t probable that they will hit their numbers next quarter in my opinion.

beas is going to struggle now...

folks,

if you can''t beat a dinosaur like IBM in the AppServer space, you have to ask yourself, how low have you sunk??
Since when did IBM ever have a lead in any software space (apart from mainframe)??

Alfred the magician''s answer was to hire the crappy dinosaurs execs from the laggards (ibm, hp) and bring them to BEA so that BEA could finally end up like a small IBM - formal but really useless.

Expect Alfred to get fired in the next 6 months or so and BEA to have a sliver of a final chance of recovering.

Expect to see this stock hover around 6 -7 range in the next few weeks. Could even go back to test support at 5, if the markets tank. Get out now longs. Shorts will make a killing on this in the next few weeks.

imo.

I''m very suspect of these numbers. As others have pointed out, the WebSphere brand name now covers a whole suite of products, not just the application server. At any rate, forgetting the numbers, we use BEA for our product and have been trying for 2 years to migrate our code base such that we could support both IBM and BEA. IBM WebSphere is a very difficult product to work with as a developer, mostly because they have decided (in standard IBM fashion) to do things differently than everyone else and product their own JDK that is not interchangeable with Sun''s. It took them an extra year to adopt JDK 1.4.x, and even now the IBM JDK 1.4.x is buggy and doesn''t have all the correct message signatures.

Had we chosen WebSphere over WebLogic as our primary development platform, we would have surely failed in getting our product to market.

Bottom line, if you want best-of-breed, you go BEA WebLogic, Borland JBuilder and Oracle Database. If you want to spend a "bomb" on a host of IBM consultants to help you figure out their crap, you choose IBM platform all the way.

No sales so talk about partners!

When the earnings were released yesterday, BEAS released almost simultanteously a PR-fluff:

== "...BEA Systems, Inc., the world''s leading
== application infrastructure software
== company, today announced that it is
== experiencing an increased number of BEA
== alliance partners certifying
== interoperability between their products
== and the BEA WebLogic Platform(TM)..."

-- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040513/sfth076_1.html

The only thing I could think when I read it was:

== "Why? Why did they release this PR-fluff?
== Does someone Big inside BEAS think this is
== a HELP? Why?"

No kidding.

I still don''t see the utility of this particular piece of fluff - it simply looks desparate.

Interesting...

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1590788,00.asp

"Do you think that BEA is at a disadvantage because you''re not involved in Eclipse?

ALFRED - Well, here''s the thing. We are a customer-driven company. If our customers come to us and say, ''Well, you have to do Eclipse, otherwise I won''t buy your runtime and you are inhibiting me from doing what I need to do,'' we''ll do it. So far? We don''t have that request. And on top of that, I think people are barely digesting the real deal, which is Workshop out there.

Standards and a set of frameworks to me are useless unless it is being applied. I think it''s much more practical when you have a full set of tools and the framework already done, and you allow people to adopt what is in there from a standard fashion. And I think our approach is a much better approach than doing Eclipse, which none of our customers is looking for.

A lot of marketing went into the program. Marketing doesn''t mean anything in our world. Look at how many programs IBM has gone through around this stuff, around component building. Oh my God. There was Project San Francisco."

IBM''S increasing market share is making it more and more attractive for Sun and Microsoft to merge in order to stay competitive with "Big Blue". Actually it would be in Sun''s best interest to do so although this would probably mean that all innovation in software would take a real
"nose dive" since there would then be no formidable competition to Microsoft anymore.

It would be interesting to know what the stats are for companies who buy based on a full technical eval (real life speed, scalability and resilience etc) rather than purely on brand name.

I''m betting that the usual supects wouldn''t even be in the running.

It would be interesting to know what the stats are for companies who buy based on a full technical eval (real life speed, scalability and resilience etc) rather than purely on brand name.

I''m betting that the usual supects wouldn''t even be in the running.

This numbers are based on tunronover in $. IBM shipps a copy of Webshpere with every AS400 sold and probably just about everything else. If you had to look at how many customers bought the Websphere App server and are using it in production I am sure you would be shocked.

Its also funny that next to this article there is an IBM ad, what does that mean? Did IBM sponsor this article? Does IBM sponsor Gartner too? Cause I am sure Garnter is not that stupid!

It''s no wonder that IBM does not want to break down its sales figures by actual product sold!

Someone should ask IBM to prove it!

CALL THEM OUT!

BEA should Join ECLIPSE:

We do not understand why BEA is not joining the Eclipse Board ? Eclipse is becoming the leading IDE.
Websphere application server is getting more and more market shares because of its integration inside WSAD and Eclipse.
BEA and Websphere are both great application servers!!!

Vlad,

Ravi -- that''s funny :)

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BEAS&t=3m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Ed, do you mean like the effects on this graph?

Since it''s a log normal chart, it looks much worse than the graph they used in this article...

Sorry, didn''t read previous comments before I posted. My point was already made.

There is a book called "How to Lie with Statistics" that talks about how you can make small effects seem large in the way you graph them. The way the graphs in this article are presented, you would think there was a 10-fold increase in the number of users of IBM in the last two years; when in fact there has only been a 10.3% gain in market share.
Likewise, one would think from the graph that the number of BEA users has dropped by two-thirds; when the actual market share is only 6.5% less than what it was two years ago.

Remember?

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-268035.html?legacy=cnet

BEA supporters are missing the big picture, BEA got here basically selling app server to techies, first to market with the best product in a boom economy.

to get to the next step they need to sell their platform product against the big boys with more mature products and much bigger install bases to farm.

the biggest hurdle is they will use price as their sword. They can discount and give their software away becasue alternate lucrative sources of revenue exist for them. BEA cannot and that will be there achilles heal. BEA does not have alternate revenue streams to compete to what amounts to "Free" If they try the net, net is zero or negative licence revenue growth.

this is why this stock is getting bashed, not for their results today but for expected results during the next quarter and beyond.

Re: KEY EXEC FIRED

Alan wasn''t fired unlike Alfred tried to intimate. He had been talking to VMWare for 6+ weeks. He resigned. You are correct that he is FAR better off.

Hey J2EEGuru did BEA fire Gartner Group too?

double speak - poor sales execution - excuses excuses - Alfred blamed merger and acquisition for poor results meanwhile Oracle and IBM are gaining license revenue - what the hell?

Hmm..well obviously sales were off in the Americas. So that''s going to cause a huge hit (though BEA sells globally... Americans are gamblers, not investors... so look for a huge sell off... could go down to $6).

If I know Alfred (and I do), heads will roll.

Ouch... conf call mentioned that the weblogic transition will continue in Q2

Translation: license revenue could be lower again.

I''m not buying until $8 or $7.

BRAVO IBM!

Actually, BEA is launching a new WebLogic magazine at their eWorld conference at the end of May. Here''s the press release.

http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=pr01269.htm&FP=/content/news_events...

According to PRNewswire-FirstCall, BEA will report its financial results for the first quarter at 2 p.m. PDT today. Should be lively!

Yes it was lively indeed!