BEA Finds a Friend's Hand in Its Pocket

Tod Nielsen, BEA's chief marketing officer, said enterprises are unlikely to bet their business on free software. "Customers look at the application server as core to their IT infrastructure. They need to know that the company selling it will invest in innovation. When you give it away free, what's your customer commitment?" he said.

Nielsen said Orion "is a creative software bundle that won't have any impact on the race between us and IBM [in the application server market]."

He added that BEA still receives a majority of its revenue from customers running the company's products on Solaris, but the percentage has dropped to 55% from 63%. At the same time, revenue derived from customers running BEA on an H-P platform has nearly doubled.

Even so, Nielsen was quick to note that BEA salespeople and Sun salespeople often make joint visits to potential customers. "Software sales drive hardware, and sometimes hardware drives software. That's not changing."

Maybe not, but with friends like Sun, does BEA really need enemies?