Oracle Buys BEA 115
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."
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).
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"
Compatibility tax (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Undisputed? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
A Plumtree Employee's Perspective (Score:1, Informative)
1. squeeze us for revenue like there was no tomorrow.
2. they didn't care about alienating our customers, as if they knew BEA'd not be around for long.
3. get us to perform the responsibilities of ranks higher in the organisation, without actually promoting us or giving us raises. In the entire former Plumtree (run as a seperate business unit) there were no promotions. Raises, if any, were kept below 2% per year, below inflation. They hired from outside rather than promote.
4. Squeeze; did I mention squeeze?
Oracle are facing an already-alienated customer base, who are actively looking at alternatives to the BEA stack. I wonder what they are going to do about it.
Yikes, I have to face the customers tomorrow: that's the one thing that those bastards in California never learned to do.