Having completed its acquisition of EAI vendor SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems joins IBM, BEA Systems, Sonic Software, and others in seeking to become the vendor of choice in providing enterprises with integration tools to build SOAs.

Sun on Thursday officially closed the $387 million transaction and is re-branding the SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) software as the Sun Java Integration Suite. Sun announced its SeeBeyond purchase in late June.

SOAs are becoming important in industries such as financial services and health care, where users are integrating data to deliver comprehensive views of information. "There"s a very wide variety of applications of this technology, anyplace where you want to combine services or combine transactions," said Sun"s Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for SOA and integration platforms at the company.

Sun"s SeeBeyond acquisition should serve as a first step in Sun"s focus on SOA architecture, said analyst Dan Mahoney, chief research officer at Forrester Research. "It"s a good jump start, and I think that they"ve said that they wanted to get into this business, and to me it shows that they"re serious about doing that," Mahoney said.

Additional steps will need to be taken to absorb SeeBeyond into Sun without simply imposing Sun"s way of doing business on the former SeeBeyond developers, Mahoney said.

Sun Java Integration Suite is written in Java and contains an integration platform as well as the ability to build composite applications.  Pricing is based on a traditional perpetual license format with subscription-based pricing available upon request. Subsequent details on subscription pricing are expected as part of a road map for the Java Enterprise System (JES) infrastructure software packages that is due in the next 90 days. The next release of the integration suite is planned for release in the first quarter of 2006.

Sun eventually will make Sun Java Integration Suite the sixth suite in JES, which now features tools and services for Web infrastructure, application management, communication, availability, and identity management.

"Our road map will detail how we will integrate this new member of the suite going forward," Keller said.