SEAGULL Strikes AGAIN -- ON Target

A New Theater In The Battle Royal For Legacy Capital

 April 2005, "Mega Consolidation in Host Access & Web-to-Host Article" 

  Read Part I & Part II of this Battle Royal Series 

by Anura Guruge
editor at large, IT In-Depth

On June 13th, just less than two months since it acquired SofTouch (on the very same day that the WRQ/Attachmate ‘merger’ was announced), SEAGULL has publicized its plan to acquire BPM specialist (and ‘managed source’ pioneer) Oak Grove Systems – a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) spin-off to boot.  This was a bold and decisive move that further bolsters SEAGULL’s standing vis-à-vis the other traditional host access/Web-to-host vendors and now puts SEAGULL and WRQ/Attachmate in a premier league of their own, well ahead of the other ‘non-mainframe’ [e.g. NEON, IBM, IONA] players.

As with the SofTouch acquisition, I tip my hat to SEAGULL, but this time more briefly.

I cannot argue that this was a good move and I have to chuckle since in mid-January I heard that another player in this space, now getting left behind in the dirt, was making moves on Oak Grove, enamored in this instance by their intriguing ‘managed source’ story.  ‘Managed source’, as Oak Grove educated me a few months later, is what open source ends up as when it comes to real, production-level, enterprise applications.  Despite having access to the source, when it comes to production-level software, you can’t have developers tweaking it at will to satisfy their own foibles.  The code has to be controlled.  So it is still open, but now managed.

One also has to acknowledge, with some due deference, that SEAGULL with MetaServer [now Whitehill] has been offering a BPM capability since March 2002 (albeit this coming on the heels of its then arch nemesis Jacada getting a BPM capability, for free, as a part of its Propelis acquisition in 2001].  So BPM per se is not a new technology to SEAGULL.

My reservations thus revolve around how SEAGULL is going to assimilate and integrate both SofTouch CrossPlex 2 and Oak Grove Reactor technology into its existing LegaSuite platform in the short- to mid-term in a meaningful, and hopefully synergistic, manner.  Yes, I think we all understand, that you could get all the SEAGULL, SofTouch and Oak Grove stuff running together.  That is the beauty of standards, XML and SOA.  The issue here is can SEAGULL add additional value to this mix.

BEA's AquaLogic

Ironically, but as a testament to its germaneness, this latest SEAGULL acquisition came to pass just as BEA was doing its utmost to get as much publicity as possible for its AcquaLogic strategy/product family following the rather flamboyant NASDAQ MarketPlace unveiling on June 9th.  AquaLogic provides a service-centric server infrastructure for managing the lifecycle of SOA-based initiatives.  In other words it is what I call a composite application server (see diagram below).  BPM is one of the many value-added functions that differentiate a composite application server from just a plain or garden variety application server; i.e. BEA AquaLogic vs. BEA WebLogic.

Yes, SEAGULL would like LegaSuite to be a composite application server, in much the same way that WRQ/Attachmate would like Verastream to be able to strut like one.  But, alak, these integration servers still have quite a long way to go.  And then we again come back to AquaLogic.  As I had stated in my BLOG WRQ/Attachmate and SEAGULL are long-standing BEA partners.  Would it thus make sense to put their lot in with AquaLogic rather than trying to recreate and duplicate a ton of complex technology, including Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) structures on their own?

That right now is the $64M question, which is roughly about what I think WRQ/Attachmate and SEAGULL, together, will make in EAI, in 2006, if the wind is in their favor and they can get their acts together.

So lets leave it at that.  I applaud SEAGULL’s new found audacity and tenacity.  They really are trying to catch a strong updraft to keep them aloft in this turbulent market.  Plus WRQ/Attachmate may already have a response in the making.  As I also pointed out in my BLOG, Jeff Hawn the new head of WRQ/Attachmate sits on the board of Applimation – an application/information lifecycle management company.  It is not BPM but another set of functionality that one needs in a composite application server.