BEA: Human Weighting and China Advantage

I am at BEA’s industry analyst conference in Sonoma. The wine hasn’t been great (but I go for “thin” acidic European plonk rather than ribena reds and butteroak chardonnays Americans fancy) but its good to catch up with some analyst spars and BEA folks I don’t see that often. And the company isn’t killing us with Powerpoint either – great job Marge, Ginger, Pam, Tracey, and Natalie.

The point of this post is not to make you think analysts spend their lives on an endless tour of exotic locations. No I am talking about diversity, community and opportunity. What does it mean in the beginning of the new century to be a Silicon Valley software house with a Hong Kong-born CEO?

Yesterday BEA’s management bench came on stage for a Q&A. The “white guys in suits” were outnumbered. Surely some mistake.. isn’t this American high tech?

Tom Ashburn, president, world wide field organization
Marge Breya, chief marketing officer
Mark Carges, CTO
Alfred Chuang, CEO
Wai Wong, executive VP products

When Alfred and Wai tour China apparently they get the full rock star treatment. Weblogic Express is doing well there. National pride can be a powerful influence on buying behaviours. Look at SAP and SuSE in Germany, for example. Jan Lindelow used to be CEO of Tivoli Systems. Nordic companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars with Tivoli while he was in charge. Was he a successful executive there? His record is mixed. But he is an awesome salesman. I remember asking the CIO of a major Scandinavian bank whether the fact Jan was Scandinavian had influenced his decision to go with Tivoli. He looked at me quizically… of course, he said, one brow cocked…

Given that China has absurdly large scale requirements Tuxedo can play a role in the country’s financial services and telecommunications buildout. We’re talking about consumer facing companies targeting markets of hundreds of millions of people through organic growth. Think about it – Chinese National Railways has 8m employees and its own university… Consider that IBM’s “proprietary” IMS transaction processing system grew 8% in 2003, with China accounting for much of the growth. IBM’s z/TPF has even won some recent new customers. J2EE has its place – but so does Tuxedo.

The traffic is not all one way of course when it comes to management and community. Of the 40 analysts that came to the event, a significant proportion were Asian. I have been to other vendors’ events with many more attendees, but only one or two Asian faces.

At dinner last night i sat with a Singaporean, a Japanese, two Americans of Indian extraction. it was interesting to hear about a new silicon valley problem. what do you do when you send you kids to school hoping they learn about American culture but 25 out of 27 of the kids in their class have Indian parents? But back to the point James.

China is the biggest market for everything for the next 100 years. Companies need to position accordingly. BEA has some natural advantages in product and people.