PALO ALTO -- As the "A" in BEA Systems, which Oracle (ORCL) bought four years ago for $8.5 billion, Alfred Chuang would seemingly have nothing better to do than hit the beach.

Instead, he's busy building a new startup -- Magnet Systems, which is competing in the "social for the enterprise" space.

With Microsoft and Jive Software among those vying to help big businesses deploy Facebook-style networks for employees, the playing field's increasingly crowded. Mindful of that, Palo Alto-based Magnet last week closed its second round of venture funding: $47 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz and mobile phone maker HTC.

Chuang said the financing valued his three-year-old company at more than $200 million.

"I'm very grateful that at 51 years old, people would still take a chance on me," he said in an interview Thursday.

That's an awfully modest statement coming from a guy venture capitalist Ben Horowitz last year called "the greatest CEO of my time." Horowitz, who also led Magnet's $12.6 million first funding round in April 2011, credited BEA for "revolutionizing the enterprise computing market" under Chuang's watch.

Chuang launched BEA in 1995 with two other former Sun Microsystems executives. It became dominant in

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middleware -- software that knits together a company's various databases, applications and operating systems.

Magnet is similar in philosophy. Rather than offering a product for end-users -- like Jive's package of social collaboration tools -- Chuang's startup makes a cloud-based platform on which companies can build their own social and mobile applications for internal use.

Chuang said the shift from desktop to mobile computing has created "radical change" for companies and helped workers become more collaborative.

But, he added, "There's no model you can follow today if you want to build an enterprise app and deploy it on mobile. There's no system."

He said the idea for Magnet came to him while trying to adjust to life in retirement.

"I was out of my mind," he said. "I tried it for two or three months, and I was just dying to have my routine back."

Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercwiretap.