Sun fills portfolio gap, acquires composite app outfit SeeBeyond

Scott McNealy & Co. got up at 5:15 in the morning (actually, they had to have gotten up earlier than that) to announce that Sun will acquire SeeBeyond.  SeeBeyond provides solutions that claim to take the pain out of building what is known as composite applications.  Theoretically, composite applications consist of discreet units of re-usable business logic that, when strung together, represent a unique business process.   The units are re-usable by virtue of their services oriented interfaces and, theoretically, with the right tools, it should be relatively simple for non-programmers to make use of them by little more than the mapping out a new business process, mixing and matching re-usable bits of business logic along the way.

Behind the scenes, after the so-called non-programmers press the equivalent of a GO button, compositing tools work out all the integration and plumbing details. In other words, they do a signficant amount of the heavy lifting.  Some tools, such as those of SeeBeyond, deal with the complications that can arise out attempts to integrate and manage units of business logic that are not only hosted by dissimilar platforms, but that are also legacy in nature -- in other words existing business logic that has no services orientation to it.  Sun, which didn't have this sort of integration solution in its software portfolio -- and which is increasingly looking to get more revenue out of  software and services (as opposed to hardware), acquired SeeBeyond for $387 million in cash. 

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