BEA Systems has bought a self-styled asset management vendor in a deal beefing up BEA's AquaLogic family for service oriented architectures (SOAs).

BEA has acquired Flashline and will sell its repository for the management of software's metadata - which hastily been rebranded BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository - along with a registry BEA is already reselling from Systinet, a division of Mercury Interactive, which is in the process of being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The Systinet product is sold as BEA AquaLogic Service Registry.

Financial terms of BEA's deal with Flashline were not released, but the employees, including founder and chief executive Charles Stack, are to join BEA's AquaLogic business group.

BEA is touting the use of Flashline's UDDI service registry with BEA AquaLogic Service Registry to manage the planning, design, rollout and maintenance of SOAs.

Flashline's began life in the re-usable software components market by offering a small library of components and a repository for storage, discovery and re-use of that software. The company began offering best practices and guidelines for the management of re-usable assets in 2003.

Last year, Flashline introduced updates aimed at tackling IT governance, compliance and SOA along with improvements to its integration adaptor for Eclipse and the launch of a new integration adaptor for CA's AllFusion Harvest Change Manager. The Eclipse plug-in allows users of Eclipse-based tooling to find and view components inside their environment. Integration with CA lets Flashline users view software assets stored in the Harvest code repository.

It is not clear whether, or how, BEA plans to integrate Flashline and Systinet. And, still missing from BEA's overall SOA picture, is a single integrated environment for design and composition of business processes and applications used in SOAs. The Flashline deal suggests that, with support for Eclipse, BEA might take the route of plugging into other vendors' composition environments via Eclipse.

SOA vision aside, BEA will no doubt also be interested in Flashline's customer list, which spans Fortune 500 businesses and federal agencies, as an immediate sales opportunity for BEA's Java and .NET products.®

Related stories

Buzzword bingo for Microsoft's Oslo (30 October 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/30/microsoft_oslo/
BEA: meet the new platform - same as the old platform (11 September 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/bea_genesis_platform/
BEA adopts virtual strategy with VMware (11 December 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/11/bea_virtualizaiton/
BEA shares slide (16 November 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/bea_third_quarter/
BEA touts an 'enterprise MySpace' (11 October 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/11/social_bea/
SOA software guy from Sun walks up to The Reg and says ... (5 October 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/05/sun_soa/
IBM price deal offered to Mercury and Borland users (4 October 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/04/ibm_rational_hp_borland_migration/
webMethods acquires Infravio (22 September 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/22/webmethods_buys_infravio/
BEA thinks modular for lightweight SOA platform (20 September 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20/bea_soa_modular/
Open source software still growing up (19 September 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/19/open_source_evans_survey/
Eclipse: We don’t have a relationship with Sun (17 July 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/17/eclipse_sun_relationship/
BEA to go organic on SOA tools (26 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/26/bea_soa_composition/
BEA takes JBoss and Sun to task on open source (24 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/bea_open_source_sun_jboss/
JBoss drools over Java business rules (3 April 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/03/jboss_drools_arjuna/
JBoss delivers message to IBM and BEA (29 March 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/jboss_messaging_web_server/
BEA fires up for Fuego (1 March 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/01/bea_fuego_acquisition/
Services carry BEA in Q4 (24 February 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/24/bea_fourth_quarter_2006/
Mercury buys Systinet for SOA goodness (11 January 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/11/mercury_buys_systinet/
Mercury and BEA extend performance deal (9 December 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/09/bea_mercury_diagnostics/
JBoss goes upscale with Arjuna deal (5 December 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/05/jboss_arjuna_acqusition/
BEA turns branding iron on Plumtree (18 November 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/18/bea_q3_05_results/