Oracle Senior Vice President Tod Nielsen, who was a marketing executive at BEA from 2001 until 2004, criticized his former employer during the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.

"Today, BEA doesn't have BPEL support," Nielsen said. But the Oracle BPEL Process Manager tool can be used with the BEA WebLogic Server application server. BPEL also has been known as WS-BPEL (Web Services BPEL).

A BEA official on Tuesday rejected the notion that the company does not support BPEL and noted that BEA was one of the companies that first proposed it, along with Microsoft and IBM. BEA supports BPEL in its WebLogic Integration' product, said the official, Bill Roth, BEA vice president of solutions and product marketing.

"I think our position is that frankly, Oracle's making too much of BPEL. Sure, it's a useful way of orchestration. [But] the fact of the matter is that BPEL has been approved by absolutely no standards body," Roth said.

"We're grateful that the Oracle folks aren't as familiar with our product as they should be," said Roth.