BEA, which did not disclose the terms of the deal, plans to incorporate the Flashline tool into its AquaLogic family as the AquaLogic Enterprise Repository to enable the tracking, governance and management of software used to build services within an SOA.

Paul Patrick, chief architect of BEA's AquaLogic product family, said that the Flashline tool -- combined with BEA's existing SOA registry to index the location of services -- will allow it to focus on the end-to-end SOA life cycle. "Flashline ... gives us a place where we can store all the information, all the metadata and policies in one spot," he said.

The repository will also give users visibility into the various dependencies of services in production to prevent new development from interfering with those services, Patrick added.

Flashline, which is based in Cleveland, will continue operations from there, BEA officials said. Flashline CEO Charles Stack and all of the company's employees will remain in Cleveland as employees of BEA.

BEA declined to disclose how many customers or employees Flashline has today.