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."

BEA Employee Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be interesting to see what they ultimately get for their $8.5B. I work in a BEA group where quite a few folks are ex-Oracle, and they have universally unkind things to say about their former employer. The mood is decidedly un-optimistic in our CA office.

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

-OracleHater

Re:Undisputed?

[Surt]

Buying a company is usually about buying their loyal customers, not about buying their product. Then you declare that the official upgrade path for their software is onto your own product's software track in the next version. Very few of the customers will revolt, thanks to limited marketplace options.

What Mr. Icahn really said

[ServerIrv]

"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.

Re:BEA Employee Comment

[ndykman]

Or Microsoft. Or IBM. And doesn't RedHat count with the whole JBoss thing?

Re:Srsly

[sdpuppy]

Arrgh.

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.

TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought

[CurtMonash]

TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought [dbms2.com]. If not SAP.

Re:Undisputed?

[Jearil]

(is anyone even using Oracle's app server for something other than supporting Oracle apps these days?)

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 with IntelliJ IDEA for my IDE (They all have to use Oracle JDeveloper). We're also the only unit using MySQL at all, everyone else uses Oracle DB. Normally I'd say that at least for DB Oracle would be in fact the better choice, however our Database unit makes that not the case.

In fact, the entire application development department is being siderun by the database department, hence the mandate that everything that can be Oracle, must be Oracle (even if it's shitty). This buyout is just one more thing that they'll try to use to pull our area over into their control... I think they must resent that we're not moving as slow as the rest of the organization.

Coupled with the buyout of MySQL this morning, my job just became a lot shakier. I hope to god that Oracle drops the horrid turd that is OAS and adopt Weblogic as their standard, but if it went the other way around because some executive at Oracle is high (which I find fairly likely every time I'm in contact with Oracle staff), it will make life around the office really annoying, and far less productive.

Work tomorrow when I tell the bosses will be interesting at any rate.