Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said, “Sun and SeeBeyond have complementary product lines and similar philosophies, so the acquisition is a good fit in that sense.”

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“Sun, however, has had a spotty track record for acquisitions, and SeeBeyond’s market for tightly coupled, single-platform EAI is rapidly disappearing. The two companies have ostensibly been committed to SOA for a while now, but both firms centered their SOA efforts on Java’s ‘write once, run anywhere’ portability value proposition, which is fundamentally at odds with SOA’s interoperability-centric value prop.

“The combination of the two companies, therefore, is shaping up as a ‘dumb and dumber’ approach to SOA, as competing vendors like BEA and Sonic Software hammer out solutions that better address the agility and heterogeneity needs of today’s enterprises.”

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