Plumtree purchased by BEA

How do entprise portal vendors keep innovating?  Plumtree was one of the very few portal providers that managed to survive long after the initial portal hype ended.  I think they barely survived the market because it is tough for portal vendors to innovate and provide customers reasons to upgrade. 

I am not sure what the real value BEA can bring to Plumtree given that fact companies like Microsoft leverage the desktop and the Office platform, Oracle takes advantages of it's suite of applications and platform, and IBM does that same.  What does BEA have to offer that will provide an incentive customers to invest and upgrade in a portal platform?  To be really honest, I have admired Plumtree in their early days as well as BEA, that is why this of interest to me.  I am not really sure how BEA survives stacked up against IBM, Oracle and Microsoft providing application service platforms.

Never the less here is the press release.

https://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=plumtree.htm&FP=/content/news_events

Good luck to my friends at BEA and Plumtree it will be a fun time competing in the market.

Ed