BEAWorld 2005 - SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In a move designed to illustrate its determination to stay at the forefront of the developer tools market, BEA Systems, Inc. , announced the acquisition of M7, an Eclipse-based tools company based in Cupertino, Calif. The acquisition of M7 accelerates the delivery of BEA developer tools on the Eclipse Tools Framework and dovetails perfectly with BEA's "blended" strategy for application development and deployment.

The BEA "blended" application strategy facilitates the bringing together of open source and commercial software in a way that radically improves developer productivity. M7 offers an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called NitroX that offers unparalleled support for the development of sophisticated web applications based on open source and industry standard frameworks, including Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and JavaServer Pages. M7 will be a key component to the BEA tool strategy for the company's entire product portfolio.

"Developers want the ability to mix-and-match the best components and deployment platforms that give them optimal building blocks to get their jobs done," said Mark Carges, chief technology officer, BEA Systems, Inc. "M7 is another step in our continued dedication to making application development more efficient and fun so that developers can be more productive."

In February 2005, BEA joined the Eclipse Foundation as a board member and strategic developer, and announced it will ship future versions of the award- winning WebLogic Workshop on the Eclipse Tools Framework. BEA is focusing on bringing the ease-of-use of WebLogic Workshop 8.1 to the Eclipse world. This will raise the productivity bar in a very substantial way by offering an IDE based on Eclipse that makes it easier to build applications on service infrastructure and application infrastructure.

Since its release, BEA WebLogic Workshop has been recognized with numerous industry awards for its ease-of-use features and innovations in the creation of Web Services, web applications and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The M7 NitroX product family: NitroX Studio, NitroX JSP IDE, NitroX Struts IDE and NitroX JSF IDE, is available today at http://m7.com/ and currently supports development on WebLogic Server, in addition to several other environments. With the acquisition of M7, BEA plans to merge its existing developer tools capabilities with M7's and provide these capabilities to the market as the BEA Workshop for Java IDE. In addition, BEA Workshop for Java will also provide a developer tooling base for all of BEA's product offerings.

The product will be available in 6-, 12- and 24-packs for companies seeking to purchase development seats for groups or departments. Pricing will be announced when the product is generally available.

About BEAWorld

BEAWorld is the annual infrastructure software technology conference designed to provide critical insights, hands-on instruction, best-practice strategies, and opportunities for interaction with like-minded professionals, industry leaders, visionaries and expert practitioners.

In addition to working to make SOA a successful reality, BEAWorld delivers the latest information on BEA's infrastructure technologies including BEA Tuxedo(R), the BEA WebLogic(R) products, the BEA AquaLogic(TM) products and a Partner Showcase to highlight the latest and greatest developments from the extensive BEA partner community. To register or receive more information about the Santa Clara event, please visit http://www.bea.com/beaworld.

Additional events are scheduled to be held throughout the year in the following cities: London (Oct. 11-12); Paris (Oct. 13-14); Prague (Oct. 18- 19); Tokyo (Oct. 25-26); and Beijing (Dec. 7-8).

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, providing standards-based platforms to accelerate the secure flow of information and services. BEA product lines -- WebLogic(R), Tuxedo(R), JRockit(R) and the new AquaLogic(TM) family of Service Infrastructure -- help customers reduce IT complexity and successfully deploy Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to improve business agility and efficiency. For more information please visit http://www.bea.com/.

Copyright (C) 2005 BEA Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. BEA, Built on BEA, Jolt, Joltbeans, Steelthread, Top End, Tuxedo, BEA WebLogic Server, BEA JRockit, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, and WebLogic are registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA AquaLogic, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, BEA dev2dev Subscriptions, BEA eLink, BEA MessageQ, BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, BEA WebLogic Enterprise, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security, BEA WebLogic Express, BEA WebLogic Integration, BEA WebLogic Java Adapter for Mainframe, BEA WebLogic JDriver, BEA WebLogic Log Central, BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, BEA WebLogic Platform, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA WebLogic SIP Server, BEA WebLogic WorkGroup Edition, and BEA WebLogic Workshop are trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA Mission Critical Support is a service mark of BEA Systems, Inc. All other company and product names may be the subject of intellectual property rights reserved by third parties.

Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the statements in this press release are forward-looking. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially include risks associated with: any unforeseen changes in the technology, standards or marketplace for enterprise information integration software; the timing of a recovery from the current economic and IT industry downturn; any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the development BEA's solutions; and any software errors related to BEA's solutions. Readers should also refer to the risk disclosures set forth in BEA's 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2005 as filed with the SEC and subsequent reports filed thereafter by BEA from time-to-time with the SEC. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are made as of the date hereof, and BEA does not assume any obligation to update such statements nor the reasons why actual results could differ materially from those projected in such statements.

CONTACT: Press & Industry Analyst Contact: May Petry of BEA Systems,
Inc., +1-408-570-8704 or May.petry@bea.com; Diana Wong of Weber Shandwick,
+1-415-248-3426 or djwong@webershandwick.com, for BEA Systems, Inc.; or News
hotline: +1-408-570-8004 or http://www.bea.com/news

Web site: http://www.bea.com/