Company Outlines Drawbacks Deal Will Have on Thousands of BEA WebLogic Customers; Extends Transition Offer to an Alternative Middleware Stack
NEW YORK, NY -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/18/08 -- GigaSpaces Technologies
today issued an open letter to BEA WebLogic customers in response to
Oracle's $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA. In the letter, the
infrastructure software platform provider outlined the damaging
impact the buyout will have on current WebLogic customers, as well as
the middleware industry.

To alleviate the ramifications the deal will no doubt have, GigaSpaces extends an offer to all current BEA WebLogic and Oracle Fusion customers who stand to suffer from the acquisition.

The complete transcript of GigaSpaces' Open Letter to BEA WebLogic
customers follows:

Dear BEA WebLogic Customer:
As you probably know, Oracle announced it is acquiring BEA for $8.5
billion. Independent industry analyst Vinnie Mirchandani said about
the deal: "Customers, unlike investors, do not have much to cheer."
You are now facing a vendor that will put you in one of two
situations:


-- They will discontinue the WebLogic product line forcing you to rip-and-
replace with Oracle Fusion middleware
-- They will continue the WebLogic product line, but will drive very
little innovation. After all, as many industry experts have noted, Oracle
is buying BEA mainly for the maintenance and support revenue stream from
its large customer base (that's you!)



Either way, you're not in a very strong bargaining position.

Perhaps more importantly, this acquisition is the final nail in the
coffin of what was the motivation for J2EE in the first place: to have
an open standard that allows easily switching from one vendor's
product to another. The reality is that there are now two
mega-vendors, Oracle and IBM, each with what is essentially their
proprietary, bloated middleware stack, which requires complex
integration of multiple components (and surely Oracle or IBM
professional services will be happy to perform this work -- for a
fee).

We have a better proposition for you: turn this predicament into an
opportunity; an opportunity to free yourself of J2EE altogether,
reduce costs, increase the agility of your enterprise and
significantly shorten your time-to-market for new products and
services.

You can do that by leveraging a truly open middleware stack -- parts
of which you may already be using, such as Spring, Hibernate and
Tomcat -- and a new kind of application server, one built for the
"cloud." Unlike a J2EE application server it is:


-- Built from the ground-up for a scale-out computing model, allowing
your applications to easily and dynamically scale across a pool of low-cost
commodity servers, just like Google;
-- Built from the ground-up for Service-Oriented Architecture, enabling
you to easily add and change software services, and re-use existing
investments in software development;
-- A single product that handles messaging, business logic and
transactional data through an open-source, commonly used programming model,
so your developers can focus on what they do best: quickly deliver new
applications to your business, without having to deal with the complexity
of writing and integrating infrastructure software.



GigaSpaces XAP is that application server, and it is already in use
today by some of the world's leading organizations such as Lehman
Brothers, Dow Jones, Nortel Networks and Virgin Mobile. GigaSpaces
adds the core layer of middleware virtualization that will enable you
to be independent of J2EE, while remaining compatible with it.

With this approach, you can significantly reduce costs by:


-- Increasing server throughput which reduces the amount of servers and
software licenses required to handle the same volumes
-- Shorter time-to-market of new software products and services:
-- Reduce deployment complexity - To scale, simply drop in more
processing resources with no code changes.
-- Avoid development complexity - Simple, open-source and commonly
used development frameworks
-- Increasing reliability through better testability and self-healing
-- Utilizing a single platform for Java, .Net and C++


To find out more:

Contact us at: info@gigaspaces.com or visit
http://www.gigaspaces.com/no-j2ee.