Found this interesting thread of TSS that’s talking about how BEA and HP are growing closer and BEA deployment on HP is up 31%. I posted my thoughts there and wanted to post them on my blog as well.

I think HP and BEA will continue to get closer and closer, but I personally don’t see HP buying BEA. I’ve been speculating about the HP BEA buyout/merger for a while and I used to think it would happen. But if you look at HP today, they are trying to be an open-we’ll-do-what-you-want type of company with a close alliance to Microsoft for the Windows market. They are adopting Linux and aggressively marketing that instead of HP-UX. I think they’ve figured out something Sun hasn’t figured out — Hardware and services is their bread-n-butter and they don’t need to waste time on software and operating systems wars. Support all of them and make your money on the hardware.

I was at BEA eWorld earlier this year and Carly Fiorina was one of the keynote speaker at the event. She didn’t want her picture taken at the BEA podium and so a special announcement was made before she took the stage about no pictures. Kinda humorous 🙂

Personally, I wish HP would buy BEA giving BEA the edge (cash) it needs to compete with IBM on the marketing side. BEA has IBM beat on the product side, but IBM has the cash to drown BEA with those entertaining IGS commercials.