All developers are looking for the best possible integration of tools within their chosen environment. But do they need a single platform provider to get it?

After my recent meeting with Oracle executives regarding improvements to its development tools, I wondered how much longer BEA and Borland can continue to go it alone against the increasing number of Web services "supersuites" purveyors such as IBM, Microsoft, and now Oracle.

Despite the fact that Oracle's ads now evangelize the unbreakability of its products --- a campaign intended to capitalize on the less than stellar (but improving) reliability and security of Microsoft products --- the company is apparently still maintaining its previously hyped assault on overly complex software. That assault is based on the notion that companies should bend their processes around the canned functionality of pre-integrated suites rather than the other way around.

Suggesting that the functionality found in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM may have reached a commoditized state, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison argues that spending additional money to customize those and other horizontal solutions cannot lead to competitive advantage and is therefore a waste of money. Instead, development funds should be routed to the vertical applications that can lead to significant differentiation and, hopefully, competitive advantage. Other large vendors with a significant business audience-- IBM, for example-- espouse a similar philosophy. Yet, there seems to be significant customer resistance to this common sense that is grounded in corporate culture rather than IT philosophy.

But, as evidenced by Oracle's latest development tool news, that's not deterring Ellison from sticking to his guns. According to Oracle product marketing vice president John Magee, developers shouldn't have to shop around in order to mix and match an integrated development environment (IDE) with best of breed plug-ins, application servers, portal servers, and databases. Magee argues that if an IDE and its plug ins (at least the important ones like data and process modeling) and the rest of the parts come from the same vendor in the form of a supersuite, the developer is likely to have a richer development experience and a final deployment that's much better optimized than what a mix and match approach can offer.

Epitomizing this mix and match approach, according to Magee, are the market leaders in the Java application server and IDE space-- BEA and Borland. To hear Magee tell it, you're better off buying a supersuite from Oracle than getting a J2EE server and portal server from BEA, a Java IDE from Borland, and the IDE plug-ins from companies like software lifecycle management tool provider Rational.

Oracle isn't the only one singing this tune. IBM and Microsoft are advocates of the one-stop-shops philosophy as well and have the supersuite-like portfolios to back it up. So the big question is: Could the supersuite approach force BEA and Borland to upgrade their already cozy relationship to a full blown merger? Or, can BEA and Borland continue to lead in their markets while still keeping each other at arm's length?

Officials from both Borland and BEA agree that deep integration and one-stop shopping are the way to go. Not only do the companies sell each other's products, both companies think they can stay separate while at the same time meeting or beating the fidelity of integration found in competitive supersuites. According to Byron Sebastian, BEA WebLogic Workshop and Portal vice president and general manager, "there's a special version of Borland's JBuilder called JBuilder Enterprise WebLogic Edition. BEA and Borland announced a collaboration on the technical and now we're stepping that [collaboration] up. The result will be additional releases of Jbuilder where the integration with WebLogic gets tighter and tighter, and we think it will be better than other single vendor offerings."

Tony de la Lama, Borland Java solution vice president and general manager, echoes Sebastian's sentiment. "Two years ago, I knocked on BEA's door. We found out we had the same customers and decided to support each other. JBuilder Enterprise WebLogic Edition is the result of that relationship and we will continue to surface more of the technologies that are available in WebLogic."

More proof that Borland subscribes to the one-stop philosophy is the recent buying spree aimed at fortifying its IDE with plug-ins and other technologies. Within hours of my interview with de la Lama, Borland completed its acquisition of TogetherSoft. That acquisition came before the ink dried on its previous acquisition of Starbase earlier in October. Borland's spree began earlier this year when it acquired optimization tool vendor VMGEAR.

Borland isn't the only vendor on the acquisition trail in the name of supersuite and IDE nirvana. Part of Oracle's recent one-stop-shop proselytizing included the message that it had integrated the TopLink technology acquired from WebGain into the Oracle 9iAS application server. TopLink can map Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) and other objects to a relational database schema. The remainder of WebGain's assets such as Visual Café were acquired by TogetherSoft prior to that company being acquired by Borland.

From consolidation to integration
This scramble to scoop up best-of-breed development technology is yet another trend that points in the direction of market consolidation around the concept of a deeply integrated supersuite. During such consolidation periods, vendors often move quickly before complementary technologies (upon which their customers depend) fall into the hands of the competition.

In what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike against the supersuite builders, Vignette recently plucked portal pure-play Epicentric from the display rack. Earlier this year, I asked Epicentric's co-founder Ed Anuff how much longer an independent market leading company like his could avoid being acquired. Apparently it wasn't long. Together, Epicentric and Plumtree commanded about 70 percent of the portal market. Look for one of the supersuite players to secure Plumtree unless, similar to Vignette's move, an out-of-segment player gets first mover advantage.

Another company that might be in the crosshairs of the supersuite providers is Rational Software. Rational is the market leader in visual modeling tools and yet another player in the IDE ecosystem that believes that the best environments for developers are those like XDE that go deep in terms of integration and that are closely wedded to the technology of the target platform.

Rational's director of developer marketing Bill Taylor agrees with Oracle's pitch for tightly integrated and optimized suites. However, he doesn't believe that developers have to go to a single platform provider like Oracle to get it.

"What we created," says Taylor, "is what we call an extended development experience (thus, XDE). It runs inside of the IDEs from Microsoft and IBM (Visual Studio and WebSphere Studio Application Developer). Our goal was to make it so that when developers use it, it's hard to see where Microsoft and IBM's IDEs stop and Rational's XDE begins. So, we are giving developers the experience that Oracle says people like, but with the best-in-class functionality that a pure play like Rational can offer."

Taylor acknowledges another criticism of Oracle's Magee: Going with best of breed components from separate players doesn't guarantee the best integration. Citing the distributed approach in the BEA and Borland world, Magee talked about how Borland-based developers most often turned to Rational for a lifecycle management tool because that functionality wasn't build into Borland's IDE. The integration between Borland's IDE and Rational's Rose, says Magee, is good, but wasn't as well done as the integration that could be achieved from a single source.

Hinting that the company couldn't integrate that deeply with all IDEs, Taylor says, "We looked at the IDE marketspace to see who were the dominant players, who had the resources to execute, and who was building products that had the necessary integration hooks for us to integrate our enterprise life cycle solution with those platforms. It was clear to us that in the Windows and .Net space, it was Microsoft, and in the Java space it was IBM with WebSphere Studio Application Developer. And those are the environments that XDE is integrated into. Rational Rose can be used alongside any IDE, but is not as deeply integrated into those IDEs as XDE is into Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM Websphere Studio Application Developer. The depth of integration varies from one IDE to the next."

Borland probably saw it the same way. With Rational devoting its deep integration resources to IDEs from Microsoft and IBM, it must have decided that it needed a more deeply integrated lifecycle management tool for itself. That would explain the acquisition of Rational competitor Starbase.

What do developers get when that level of integration is achieved? Officials at MicroFocus, another IDE plug-in pure play, think their products exemplify what good integration means from one IDE to the next. MicroFocus recently introduced support for mainframe Linux. Ian Archbell, who is vice president at this leading provider of Cobol development tools, talks about how the company's plug-ins for Java IDEs must be different from those for Windows as well as from MicroFocus' own IDE. One reason MicroFocus has its own IDE is for developers who are deploying to an IBM mainframe environment where support for technologies like VSAM is needed. "Leaving VSAM support in our tool for Visual Studio or a Java IDE would be unnecessary baggage. Each of our tools is closely tuned to the target deployment environment," says Archbell.

The driving reason that companies like MicroFocus, Rational, and Borland remain independent is that they are platform neutral. All three companies make tools that can target either the Windows or Java application serving platforms. Acquiring or merging with platform neutral vendors can be a sticky issue for platform-specific vendors like Oracle. Before Oracle acquired WebGain's TopLink technology from WebGain, it had its sights set squarely on its own database and J2EE platform. But to keep TopLink users from getting restless over the acquisition, Oracle had to release a statement of direction that it would continue TopLink's support for competing application servers and databases from vendors like BEA and IBM.

This could be one reason that J2EE-devotees like BEA keep some distance from platform-agnostic companies like Borland. Breaking from the Java religion (and having to support your competitor's platforms the way Oracle is doing) may be too bitter a pill to swallow.

Still, stranger things have happened. I expect that the consolidation in the now maturing supersuite space is far from over.

Care to share your consolidation speculations with your fellow ZDNet readers? One of David's favorite longshots is a merger between BEA and Borland that eventually merges with Sun (which desperately needs some better traction for its developer tools). But that would mean Sun has to, gulp, support Windows. TalkBack below, or write to david.berlind@cnet.com.