In honor of Oracle finally completing the BEA acquisition, I asked one of my old bosses, Peter Gassner, to write a guest post on some of BEA memories.

Peter actually came to PeopleSoft to fix up the old 2 tier client/server architecture and BEA played a big role in that. But I'll let Peter tell the story.

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Oracle finally owns TUXEDO. You can read it here. Sure, it does not mention TUXEDO, but it is in there, and it started it all.

The TUXEDO middleware product played a big part in PeopleSoft's technical history, starting from the release of PeopleSoft 7 in 1997. It is kind of interesting to trace the history of TUXEDO as it passed on from company to company and became involved with PeopleTools.

It started inside AT&T in the early 1983 and found it's way to Novell in 1993 (by way of Unix System Laboratories). It was there in early 1996 that PeopleSoft and TUXEDO met. I still remember the very small conference room (no windows) in New Jersey where Baer Tierkel, Rick Bergquist and I met with some of the core inventors of TUXEDO, including Mark Carges and Randy McBlane. We liked the software and the people. We liked it better than Tibco, MQseries, or the various other things we saw. We really did not feel like building middleware ourselves (very hard work!), so we thought OEMing TUXEDO would be good.

But, before we could complete an OEM deal, TUXEDO was snapped up again, by a tiny company that was just forming called "BEA", which stood for Bill, Ed, and Alfred. What was this BEA, we thought? Rick, Baer and I met with Bill, Ed, and Alfred, and decided "still good people, still good software, lets go ahead". That became a great partnership for BEA and PeopleSoft. It made PeopleTools more robust, and it had some not small hand in the OEM success that BEA had with TUXEDO and later with Weblogic.

Over the years BEA grow. BEA acquired WebLogic in 1998 and PeopleSoft OEMed that as well. I still remember talking to Alfred over lunch one day in 1998 after the weblogic purchase. He made a small comment that I always remember. He said with a very straight face: "That weblogic stuff is just flying off the shelves." I probably should have bought some BEA stock at that point:-) TUXEDO meanwhile was alive and ticking inside PeopleTools. Sure, it was all wrapped up in "psadmin" so that the quite unsightly configuration files were not seen, but it was there.

And now, TUXEDO finally comes home to roost in the great enterprise software roosting ground, Oracle

Congratulations, TUXEDO old boy, you have done well.


Peter Gassner
CEO
Verticals onDemand
PeopleTools Alumni (1995-2003)

Labels: 2008, History