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Oracle Buys BEA

Posted by Zonk on from the consolidate-much dept.

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."

7 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Oracle is a bigger evil than Microsoft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Oracle is a bigger evil than Microsoft.

  2. i was just reading by Surt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. "wtfismiddleware" tag by Murmer · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "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?

    It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.

    --
    Mike Hoye
    1. Re:"wtfismiddleware" tag by neurovish · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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?

      It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically. So how does an in house Java application running on JBoss and using a MySQL database fit into your analysis of Middleware?
  4. ...or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .... 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.

  5. Re:Undisputed? by EricTheGreen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Normally very true. Muddled somewhat in this case by the overall bland reputation of the Oracle products that overlap BEA's (is anyone even using Oracle's app server for something other than supporting Oracle apps these days?)

    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...

  6. Re:Standards by durdur · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It would be nice if this were true, but for non-trival use cases there isn't any such thing as a "standard" database - they are not really compatible or feature equivalent - although you can hide the differences quite a bit. Ditto for application server. Stray into advanced areas and you will find differences in the vendors' tech stacks. So there is some inevitable cost to changing stacks. Some developers do target multiple different stacks and keep their software compatible with all of them but that costs, too.