Middleware giant BEA Systems continued its push into the burgeoning market for service oriented architecture (SOA) software yesterday, shelling out $87.5 million to acquire business process management (BPM) specialist Fuego.

BEA said Fuego's BPM suite would be integrated into its AquaLogic family of SOA management products and provide the foundation of a new Business Service Interaction product line.

The move highlights the growing interest infrastructure software providers are showing in process management capabilities as they seek to ensure firms' SOAs fit into the requirements of the business.

SOAs allow a firm to take application components and integrate and reuse them to create more flexible applications. Theoretically, integrating business process modeling capabilities with SOA management tools would allow firms to quickly change business applications as business processes change. As a result IT managers could better ensure that staff are provided with the right data and functionality to perform business processes.

Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive of BEA said in a statement that the deal was indicative of the vendor's commitment to the SOA market. "The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments," he added.