BEA's name is just its founders' initials: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang, three Sun Microsystems veterans. They started the company in 1995 with a shopping trip. Their big early prize was Tuxedo, Novell's software for keeping huge streams of transactions moving in order. When BEA went public in April 1997, companies were trying to hook their old mainframe systems up to the new web. They needed software in the middle, and BEA sold it.

Buying the Middle Layer

BEA began by acquiring the two largest resellers of Tuxedo, then Tuxedo itself. It kept buying other middleware companies. The bet was that big companies would never throw out their old systems. They would pay for software that let those systems talk to each other and to the web. In 1998 BEA bought WebLogic, a San Francisco startup that had built the first standards-based Java application server. WebLogic became BEA's best-known product.

Six Dollars, Then Oracle

BEA priced 5 million shares at $6 in April 1997 and raised about $30 million. The stock closed its first day at $6.25. It was a quiet start. Then WebLogic took off with the dot-com boom, and BEA grew past $1.5 billion in yearly revenue. In October 2007 Oracle offered $6.7 billion, and BEA turned it down. Oracle came back with $8.5 billion. The deal closed in April 2008, and BEA's products became part of Oracle's middleware line.

Cover: View of Ponte Lugano on the Anio, from Views of Rome, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a bridge (middleware connecting systems).