BEA Systems has agreed to acquire Fuego in a $87.5m cash transaction.

The acquisition will form the foundation of BEA's new Business Service Interaction product line that is part of the AquaLogic suite of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software.

SOA is an architecture to build and maintain applications in an enterprise. Rather than designing applications from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company. Aqualogic provides an infrastructure to manage and deploy services both within an organisation and between partners.

SOAs eventually have to allow employees to create custom services and automate business processes by pulling data from a series of applications and sources. BEA envisions that business managers currently manually pasting data into spreadsheets will soon move to such services.

The Business Service Interaction software offers software that allows organisations to create and manage such automated processes in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical users.

The middleware vendor is considered a leader in the nascent SOA market and is aggressively building out the product group through both acquisitions, internal development and reuse of parts of its WebLogic application server software.