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Oracle Buys BEA
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 16, 2008 01:41 PM
from the consolidate-much dept.
from the consolidate-much dept.
In an event not as surprising as this morning's buyout announcement, but still noteworthy, Oracle has purchased BEA Systems. The middleware maker was snapped up for the sum of $8.5 billion, the second offer Oracle put forward. "BEA had long been considered a prime takeover target in an industry that has been consolidating for several years, but BEA executives had repeatedly dismissed Oracle's overtures, saying the company could perform better independently. Mr. Icahn began buying up BEA shares last summer, and today owns 13 percent of the company. The deal makes Oracle the undisputed leader in the market for middleware, business software that gets its name from its role as a layer of programming code that resides between a company's database system and the payroll, human resources and inventory systems that use the same data."
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IT: Oracle's $6.7 Billion Bid for BEA Turned Down 61 comments
andy1307 writes to tell us that according to the Mercury News, Oracle has made an unsolicited bid to buy BEA Systems for about $6.7 billion. BEA confirmed that it rejected the $17 a share bid as too low. "BEA told Phillips that its board of directors believes BEA 'is worth substantially more to Oracle, to others and, importantly, to our shareholders than the price indicated in your letter.' Oracle's aggressive bid may be an attempt to pre-empt an acquisition by others, Finley said. Those named in the past as potential suitors include IBM, the German software company SAP AG and Hewlett-Packard. Trip Chowdhry of Global Equity Research said he expects a counterbid from SAP, which he said needs BEA to survive. 'If they don't get BEA, probably in two years SAP will be on the block to sell itself,' Chowdhry predicted. Oracle needs to keep BEA out of competitors' hands, he said. Chowdhry said the offer currently 'is not right. Probably at $21 the deal will get done.'"
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BEA Employee Comment (Score:5, Interesting)
Any tips on how to request to be on the list of layoffs (to get the severance)?
-OracleHater
Re:BEA Employee Comment (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:BEA Employee Comment (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't ever see Oracle acquiring IBM. Steve Mills would laugh in Larry Ellison's face and cast him aside like a little used rag-doll.
There was a time (Score:2)
...or... (Score:2, Insightful)
Although Oracle has a knack of taking perfectly good products and tying them to Oracle in ways that aren't fathomable.
For example, Oracle's LDAP service requires you to use an Oracle DB to store the data attributes, despite the fact that this is demonstrable a bad thing. Everything Oracle does is not just to make money, but to make it selling you more DB licenses, even if it doesn't make technical sense to do so.
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I think it's pretty safe to say at this point that if you work for a company that has anything to do with middleware, database software, or pretty much any other enterprise software, you'll eventually end up working for Oracle or being laid off by Oracle.
I work for IBM on DB2 LUW. Should I be worried? :-)
Oracle and IBM continue to acquire companies in the middleware space to fit into their strategies. Buying BEA is a large commitment on the part of Oracle and it'll be interesting to watch any fallout or rejoicing in the coming months.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:BEA Employee Comment (Score:5, Interesting)
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Seriously, if there are rumors of layoffs, talk to your manager about it or HR.
Re:BEA Employee Comment (Score:5, Informative)
I was at Plumtree when BEA acquired us (now it's the "Business Interaction Division" making the ALUI products) and a number of people said to their managers "BEA isn't the place for me" and walked away pretty happy.
The joke was always that BEA stands for "Built Entirely on Acquisitions"
Parent
Next Headlines (Score:4, Funny)
I'm going for
Sun buys Oracle
Google buys Sun
Google buys Microsoft
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But as wicked a company as oracle is, I wouldn't get surprised if they discontinued Weblogic Server and kept on commiting mass OC4J.
i was just reading (Score:5, Insightful)
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After developing a failed project based on the Oracle stack last year, I would have to agree. I hope I never have to use OAS, and JDeveloper ever again. Oracle DB wasn't too bad, and JSF was buggy but somewhat alright to work with. But not nearly as nice as Spring/Hibernate. IBM seems to definitely be more advanced in their middleware tools, and I would choose them hands down.
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http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/14/oracle-consolidation-openworld-tech-cx_wt_1115techoracle.html [forbes.com]
There was some better source, unfortunately I can't find it at the moment.
Basically, it sounded like Oracles efforts to find commonality in all of their platforms were turning into a mess. Not working there myself I can't confirm or deny.
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Corporate buyouts R back (Score:2)
"wtfismiddleware" tag (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
Compatibility tax (Score:3, Informative)
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
Agreed though I would add lack of compatibility (or inability to plan compatibility) to the items being taxed. For a lot of companies "off the shelf" just doesn't quite get the job done and heaven forbid two pieces of software actually communicate. [/sarcasm] While I certainly wouldn't argue forward compatibility [wikipedia.org] is easy (quite the opposite in fact) I see middleware as the cost of building or buying systems with insufficient flexibility up front. Companies get trapped by limitations in off the shelf so
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Well, I know where I wouldn't invest
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"Middleware" is IT-speak for "we've got this closed-source thing over there, and it doesn't talk at all to this closed-source thing over here, and we have no idea what their data formats or wire formats are but we've spent scads of money on both of them and now we need them to talk to each other, so can you please figure out how to make that work?
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
So how does an in house Java application running on JBoss and using a MySQL database fit into your analysis of Middleware?
Re:"wtfismiddleware" tag (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
While middleware is appropriate in the context you put forward, it is also appropriate in the "We have a mainframe app we built ourselves 15 years ago and we need to integrate it with a new web app we've developed and have those to apps work together with all our external partners and regulatory bodies" type scenario. Whether the source code of either system is open or closed is irrelevant if the interfaces are well defined. Middleware makes sense if you look at it from the point of view of a business performing a staged upgrade, whereby they can leave legacy systems which aint broke running, implement new functionality on new systems (which wont require them to hire a bunch of 70+ year old COBOL codgers to maintain it for the next 15 years) and then migrate the old functionality to newer tech. It all happens seemlessly with a good middleware solution, at least in theory.
Middleware is not a closed source tax, it is the mortar that helps keep solid infrastructure solid, whether you use open or closed source software.
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Oracle buys BAE, oh wait ... (Score:2)
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Having some jet fighter factories and finally wipe that loser bill gates out of sight, so the world would finally recognize him, Larry Elison, as the One and truly One.
What Mr. Icahn really said (Score:3, Interesting)
"This transaction is an excellent example of the great results that can be achieved for all constituencies when the shareholder activist is able to work cooperatively with management," Mr. Icahn said in a statement. (from TFA)
Translation...this hostile takeover is an excellent example of how I can buy up lots of stock, sue said company into being bought out, the stock price artificially goes up so I make tons of money, lots of employees get screwed, and I don't care about the pawns in my money game," Mr Icahn laughed as he went to the bank with his ill gotten, but "legal" gains.
Hmm (Score:3, Funny)
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Wikiquote to the rescue! [wikiquote.org]
Icahn takes credit (Score:2)
I think the other stakeholders (employees, customers) will take a wait-and-see approach.
Re:Srsly (Score:5, Funny)
It's a very important ware. You might say it's essential for enterprises.
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Re:Srsly (Score:5, Informative)
In BEA's case there talking about Tuxedo ( distributed messaging/ queuing system), weblogic ( J2EE app Server) and aqualogic ( a compilation of buzzwords compliant programs that I don't understand).
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act [wikipedia.org]
Re:Srsly (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, sounds about right.
But for those to whom the reply sounds like a foreign language (on the order of one like Guugu Yimithirr), perhaps an example is in order.
From my understanding:
You're at an ATM machine. The front end is what you work with - the user interface that you are telling that you want to transfer $xx to another account.
The back end are the data bases that receive all that information
The middle ware is what makes sure the transaction goes through without error even though computers are crashing left and right and network connections are being chewed upon by evil squirrels.
Early days it was easy to see who had BEAS middleware on the web.
Fill your cart with junk, and hit the browser back button, not the screen back button.
If you lost everything in the cart, most likely it was IBM middleware.
If everything still worked no matter how much abuse you gave, BEAS software was working behind the scenes.
Parent
Re:Undisputed? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Undisputed? (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is BEA's customers are in for more of a re-branding than a product EOL: many of the BEA stack component technologies would be folded into the Oracle product mix and renamed. I'm not convinced the BEA brand was a big draw for new business these days anyway, so it would be a manageable pain from Oracle's perspective. The biggest headache in this case may be getting BEA's current customer base to not cut bait and migrate once they see Oracle's product pricing, post-branding.
One big EOL risk (IMHO) is the AquaLogic stuff, given Oracle's big push into SOA the past couple of years--Ellison, et al, may not want to eat that R/D.
Not good times right now for the majority of BEA's staff though, in any event...
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With any luck, this will eventually mean OAS will go away to be replaced by WebLogic. That would make sense, though... we'll see what Oracle actually does.
I'm still trying to make sense of using anything other than Tomcat, but some corps just like to spend money, I guess.
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Tomcat is my container of choice for servlets and JSPs...but it won't help you much as an EJB container unfortunately. That was, once upon a time, a big selling point for the BEA stack. And, probably not coincidentally, as EJB's began to acquire a bit of a bad smell in the J2EE community BEA became a bit less attractive an option given the alternatives available for the J2EE stack (JBoss an
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JBoss is the answer, there. I stand corrected. I don't know why anyone would use anything besides JBoss or Tomcat. Thanks for the correction, I'm ashamed I let that slip.
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Oh unfortunately yes. I work for a New York State agency and we use almost exclusively Oracle Application Server. I say almost because my unit is the only one using something else, and that something else happens to be BEA. This is actually quite distressing, because I've seen what my collegues have to deal with with OAS and they always tell me how lucky I am to be using Weblogic for my J2EE server, along w
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That probably is the norm, but Oracle is not doing this to PeopleSoft & JD Edwards customers. At least, they're not pushing hard and fast. They've announced (and in fact have been delivering) multi-year support, including non-Oracle-Applications (i.e., "Fusion") upgrades.
Standards (Score:2)
If I develop an application following the MVC model:
- Model: data accessed through standard SQL
- View: web based.
- Controller: J2EE standard
I can change:
- Model: the OS of my clients
- View: I only need a J2EE application server (jboss / websphere / whatever)
- Database: I only need an standard database (Oracle / SQLServer / Postgresql)
I'll use whatever product is the best to solve my problems. For example, if suddenly Oracle wants to charge lots of money for a database instance,
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Re:Oracle is a bigger evil than Microsoft. (Score:5, Funny)
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Nice try, cocksucker.
TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought (Score:3, Interesting)