BEA Systems, a flagship investment in Information Technology, was founded to address a massive need for software to manage large volumes of transactions across increasingly distributed and heterogeneous networks. When Warburg Pincus met Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang in September 1994, Bill Coleman was President of SunIntegration Services, the entity responsible for making Sun's servers function in the field. Ed Scott, previously head of Sun's Federal business, was EVP of sales and marketing at Pyramid Computer, and Alfred Chuang was Coleman's chief technical officer at SunIntegration. Warburg Pincus agreed to provide $750,000 to develop market and technical analyses and to write a business plan. In January 1995, the firm provided seed funding and incubation services and collaborated with BEA in developing a near-term operating plan and multi-year strategy, and in September 1995 agreed to provide $50 million of capital to launch the company. BEA's initial architecture was completed in February 1996 with acquisition of the Tuxedo product line from Novell, and Warburg Pincus committed an additional $40 million of capital to guarantee minimum payments to Novell. In late 1998, BEA's acquisition of WebLogic and its leading web application server positioned the company for the extraordinarily rapid commercialization of the Internet. BEA went public in 1997 and has raised almost $1 billion of capital in the public markets to date. Today, BEA delivers the leading platform for web-enabled business applications. BEA's transaction platform, coupled with BEA consulting, education, and support services, helps companies launch reliable e-commerce applications quickly.

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