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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."
Oracle is a bigger evil than Microsoft.
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
JBoss and Postgres never looked so good!
If BEA is worth 8.5 billion dollars, the dump I took last night has to be worth at least $20 billion.
WTF is middleware?
Ok, I hereby dispute it.
.. making it super intuitive and easy to develop applications for it.
.. but look at some of the companies Cisco has bought, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
Anyway, why do companies get bought for billions and then only a few hundred thousand dollars is spent by the new owner on developing new features etc.
Imagine if the 8.5 billion was spent only on developing the product
Examples too numerous to list
Anyone else notice that?
About how Oracle is floundering, and quite close to melting down from its attempts at integrating all the middleware platforms it has picked up in the last four purchases it made. Obviously, when you're having serious trouble getting all your different software platforms integrated, the best solution is to buy another one. Good move Oracle.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Looks like the interest rate slashing and high inflation is starting to pay off.
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
Mike Hoye
Am I the only person who read BAE Systems?
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Oracle has a pretty robust portfolio. As with all large mergers in the past (HP/Compaq etc) the kinks will be ironed out and Oracle will eventually be king of the enterprise app space where there is a LOT of money to be made. Whether the big "E"nterprises get their money's worth is another question. Because the ones I have seen love to through around the big name apps they have but tend to have a less than stellar implementation and support structure around them.
Was I the only one thinking that?
"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.
Nope. My brother sent me an email this morning stating he saw the headline that Oracle was buying BEA Systems. (I work for BAE Systems). My response was:
I saw that too. Hopefully they'll drop the "BEA" name in the acquisition and that will end the confusion between BAE Systems and BEA Systems.
From Wikipedia: BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is one of the major companies developing enterprise infrastructure software. BEA makes middleware, products that help software run on top of databases. Founded in 1995, BEA has specialized in the enterprise infrastructure software market throughout its 12 year history, and currently has 78 offices in 37 countries. BEA is headquartered in San Jose, California.
.... or IBM, or Software AG, or SAP
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.
Any bets on the next few headlines today?
I'm going for
Sun buys Oracle
Google buys Sun
Google buys Microsoft
No Bea Arthur jokes. The world has truly moved on. *sigh* I'm old. :-(
I love that NoScript blocks that lame minicity shit.
No you can't have people in your city. Not yours.
So who is up next in this game of Techno-Monopoly that we are playing today? Apple to buy Red Hat? Microsoft purchases Mozilla? And who is the race car?
Nice try, cocksucker.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
That is why we have standards.
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, I'll try to move to another database (this is the "commoditization" of the market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity )
Saying something to the effect of "This transaction is an example of the great results for everyone that can be attained when the shareholder activist works closely with management."
I think the other stakeholders (employees, customers) will take a wait-and-see approach.
There was a time I'd have said exactly that about DEC and Dell.
TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought. If not SAP.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
middleware sucks my ass
Does this mean they will have finally have a few on-staff web programmers that have a clue how to write usable web applications? Seriously, their timecard and expense reporting webapps SUCK.
Odd though -- Oracle already HAS a J2EE application server they were marketing and including with their database. What does this mean for Weblogic? Even better yet, what does this do to vendors that OEM Weblogic, such as a little company called Vignette...
Hey, **AIN'T NOBODY** BUYING SAP. While they do make some "muddleware", their day job is supplying big companies with "financial systems" that run everything else in sight. Do you really think the Global 2000 want any company buying their favorite financial systems provider? Larry already makes them nervous (having bought #2 PeopleSoft Financial to merge with #3 Oracle Financial). Given most of the potential buyers are in the US - Microsoft, IBM, Apple (had to throw them in; imagine Jobs in a gray or blue suit), Cisco?, Google ??? - just never going to happen. I believe SAP will stay "single", given the number of SAP customers whose Head Offices are located somewhere in the EU (especially Germany and Switzerland).
...
TIBCO on the other hand - TOAST! Paging Carl Icahn
"Software T-Rex eats Software Brontosaurus while OSS Meteor comes closer and closer."
I can't help but think of both of these companies as outdated giants from the last decade.
In that respect they go together very well.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
I've been working on middleware for 20 years, though I didn't know that for the first ten years. Middleware sits at the intersection of the application (the business logic that actually does something), the network and the operating system. So if, for example, you book an airline ticket using Expedia, the application is the Expedia booking engine for the booking which talks to the Global Distribution System (Sabre) for the aggregated data about flights, which talks to the airline reservation service (Worldspan perhaps) to actually reserve the seat. There is a ton of middleware involved. Both Sabre and Worldspan use TPF middleware for running the transactions (though Sabre is supposed to be migrating away from TPF). Expedia probably uses a J2EE server for its application middleware. The browser you use is middleware, as is the web server in front of Expedia. There may be middleware between the Expedia J2EE server and its database (JDBC and ODBC are both classed as middleware). There may be queues used to guarantee delivery of messages, these too are middleware.
BEA has Tuxedo middleware which mainly competed with IBM's CICS and IMS transaction monitors. BEA is best known for its WebLogic J2EE server which competes with IBM's WebSphere J2EE server (very similar to CICS in purpose, though standard compliant and supporting only Java programs). Oracle has its own J2EE server which has never caught on.
John F Schlesinger Temenos UK