Oracle Buys BEA

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

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

A marketing term for any piece of software that a user does not directly see, or alternatively any piece of software a journalist doesn't understand.

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

[Darkforge]

Any tips on how to request to be on the list of layoffs (to get the severance)?

Ask your manager nicely. I'm serious!

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" ... they seemed to know how to handle themselves when acquiring. Here's hoping they'll handle themselves gracefully as they're being acquired.

Compatibility tax

[sjbe]

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 software or sometimes by poorly designed custom software. Not always avoidable but middleware is frequently the cost. Unfortunately the IT world is so unpredictable it's really hard to plan even 5 years out sometimes.

Re:Undisputed?

[FreeBSDbigot]

> declare that the official upgrade path for their software is onto your own product's software track

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

[Max Littlemore]

"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?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The short dalliance of our people and technology inside the BEAuraucracy before the even bigger fish came along, was a clear-cut application of the Babbage Principle. The end goal was to overvalue the stock (no different from Enron except that it was legal). The means were to:

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.