While the purchase is a good fit because the companies’ products are complementary and the companies have similar philosophies, the benefit for customers of either company isn’t as clear, according to ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.

The challenge that SOA presents to middleware vendors such as SeeBeyond, Bloomberg says, is that companies simply “don’t need to buy that much new software to make SOA work. SOA is best practices. It’s architecture. It’s a discipline that may involve some software purchases, but you can build SOA on whatever you have.” In that sense, adding integration software to Sun’s existing JES suite “isn’t going to make their SOA software story any stronger per se.”

SeeBeyond, which has been losing money, will continue to face a big challenge after the acquisition, Bloomberg says, because ICAN is essentially a proprietary EAI platform. That doesn’t lend itself well to SOA. In ICAN, Bloomberg says, SeeBeyond “built a platform that supports open standards and that interoperates…and called it SOA-this and SOA-that. But it’s still a proprietary EAI platform. The pieces of ICAN work together on a very tightly coupled basis, using some of the nuts and bolts of how the Java language works. That works, but it’s not inherently service-oriented.”

Read more at: ADT Magazine