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With its recent 192 million acquisition of application server vendor WebLogic, BEA Systems took a big step toward marrying transaction processing systems to the World Wide Web.
This is the latest move by a company that intends to become the "Home Depot of middleware," says co-founder Ed Scott, referring to the onestop-shopping philosophy of the nationwide home-improvement retailer.
"We've been a public company for six quarters, and we've been exceeding Wall Street analysts' expectations every quarter," says Scott, whose firm turned a profit in fiscal 1998 and more than doubled its revenue from the previous fiscal year.
Middleware, such as BEA's flagship Tuxedo offering, is the unsung and invisible software plumbing that lets applications on a network share information.
For many companies, middleware has been so strategically important that they've invested millions of...