Sun Microsystems today confirmed that it has bought business integrator SeeBeyond in a $387m cash deal.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Sun will integrate SeeBeyond's product range as a sixth suite in its Java Enterprise System by the end of this year. 

"We have just jumped right to the front of the business integration market," said Sun chairman Scott McNealy.

"One other big winner will be our integrators. They would certainly rather use our products than products like WebSphere."

McNealy highlighted Sun's deal with the UK's National Programme for NHS IT as a showcase for its technology. He boasted that the system was already handling six billion transactions a year between 40,000 separate sites.

Sun has been on a buying spree this summer, spending over $4bn in the past two months on firms including StorageTek and Tarantella as it seeks to become a full service vendor.

McNealy said that the company was planning to continue this growth, both organically and through acquisition.

Principal analyst Shawn Willett with Current Analysis called the acquisition a good move for Sun.

"This fills a gaping hole in their middleware for integration," Willett told vnunet.com.

Willett expects that Sun will combine the SeeBeyond software with the Open ESB reference implementation of the Java Business Integration specifications. Sun kicked off the open source ESB development project on Monday at JavaOne in San Francisco.

The acquisition puts Sun in direct competition with BEA, which recently unveiled its Aqualogic line of service oriented architecture (SOA) management products. It also increases competition with other long time integration partners including Tibco and the integration offerings of Oracle.

That is however a necessity, Willett said.

"You can't just sit this thing out. You have to have everything. That's what people are buying."

Tom Sanders contributed to this story from California