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."
Oracle is a bigger evil than Microsoft. (Score:1, Insightful)
i was just reading (Score:5, Insightful)
"wtfismiddleware" tag (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
...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.
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...
Re:"wtfismiddleware" tag (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
Re:Standards (Score:3, Insightful)