Old news: BEA Systems acquired Fuego Inc..
Starting March 1st, virtually all Fuego employees (including myself) became BEA employees. There are few organizational changes, which helps minimize disruptions on our productivity and service.
I've been with Fuego since its early days. I started working for Fuego's ancestor company, InterSoft, as a Java/C++ developer in 1997.
I have different feelings about the acquisition. On the one side I feel a bit nostalgic: the company I somehow helped build is no more. But on the other side I'm proud to say Fuego was no "bubble", and I'm very positive that BEA's infrastructure and steering will provide the power to support the crazy growth we are experiencing, and bring the product to the next level.
All analysts are talking about BPM systems these days. BPM became a buzzword in the Enterprise software market. This is nothing but a proof of how far ahead the founders of Fuego were (and probably how clueless some analysts are?): the product itself was started in 1997, and it was called jBPM (yes, the same name later taken by the now JBoss-sponsored jBPM project).
I left Fuego for a job at a dot com in 1999. I returned a year later, after an invitation to join the new Fuego headquarters in Dallas.
I arrived in Dallas in Jan 2001, together with 2 other members of the FuegoBPM development team. Our objective was kinda the reverse to that of an off-shoring endeavor: instead of outsourcing software development and building an off-shore team to lower costs, we had to bring the technical knowledge to the US operation and build a good team of technical people to support and implement solutions with the FuegoBPM product for the US market.
Here we are five years later. Profitable, with a solid market position, and busier than ever.
FuegoBPM is now BEA's AquaLogic BPM Suite, a component of the AquaLogic Business Service Interaction product line.
Again, I must congratulate founders Felix and Emilio for such an impressive vision and execution, and everyone who worked at Fuego and helped it got this far.