The Java software maker saw explosive growth during the Internet boom of the late 90s by supplying the back-end application server software to run Web applications. Company chief executive and founder Alfred Chuang wants that growth to continue. His goal is to make BEA a $3bn (£1.6bn) company within the next five years.
But things have changed since the go-go days of the Internet boom. BEA is facing increased competition from IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. Open-source application servers are increasingly popular. Corporate customers are also winnowing down the number of technology suppliers they work with. That can pose a challenge for BEA, which doesn't have the same broad product line or as many contacts within corporate customers as its larger competitors.
BEA's strategy has been to widen its product line around a suite of server products and to popularise cutting-edge software like its WebLogic Workshop Java development tool. In its latest "Liquid Computing" vision, BEA's sales prospects depend largely on the adoption of a modern, more modular design approach called services-oriented architecture. At its eWorld customer conference in San Francisco, company chief executive Chuang discussed the company's strategy and size.
Q: You said BEA is the perfect size to innovate. But you could make the argument that as a mid-sized company with a billion dollars in revenue, you don't have the same development and marketing resources, compared to IBM or Microsoft.
A: Well, you could always argue that we are already too big. We have 700-plus engineers, and I had so much more fun when we were 10 people in 1995. But you can't stay at 10 people -- this is about growth.
Innovation has two parts. One is making the technology itself, and the other is taking it to the market.
From our perspective, we're still at a size at which we can build something new, like (mobile-technology initiative) Alchemy and get it to market. Large companies can't do that. Their sales process is too complicated, and updating their legacy is too hard. I think we're still at the size where we can innovate and get it to market very quickly.
