BEA completes acquisition of Plumtree Software to provide a multi-platform portal

By combining the Plumtree and BEA portal portfolios, BEA will be able to better provide customers with improved enterprise productivity by offering both collaborative and transactional portals across multiple platforms and application servers.

This acquisition will lead BEA to provide the most open and comprehensive solutions for empowering customers to leverage portal technologies as part of their Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) while being free to choose how best to mix-and-match applications servers, operating systems, development environments and programming languages to meet their business need.

"The portal is becoming the point of integration in the enterprise," said Diyaa Zebian, General Manager, Middle East & Egypt, eSolutions BEA.

"Customers in the Middle East will benefit from the powerful combination of BEA as the leader in portal, application and service infrastructure, and Plumtree, as the leader in portal and collaboration software. The acquisition of the Plumtree portfolio will make BEA the leading provider of the most open, extensible and standards-based J2EE, .Net and Service-Oriented platform in the industry."

For approximately US$ 204 million, BEA acquired all of the outstanding common stock and vested options of Plumtree in exchange for US$ 5.50 per share in cash for the outstanding common shares and US$ 5.50 per share less the exercise price for the vested options. In addition, all outstanding unvested options to purchase Plumtree common stock were automatically converted into options to purchase approximately 1.8 million shares of BEA common stock.

The acquisition was approved by the Plumtree's stockholders. Effective immediately, Plumtree will become a key part of BEA and the Plumtree ticker symbol, PLUM, will be removed from NASDAQ listing. As part of the close of the transaction, Plumtree is a new BEA product unit.

"Customers are seeking cross-platform connectivity and productivity technologies to help them collaborate and build their service-oriented architecture solutions," said Zebian. "Today, BEA can provide the most complete portal portfolio for all composite application and portal enterprise requirements."