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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
It's that thing that sits between topware and bottomware.
It's a very important ware. You might say it's essential for enterprises.
That valuation is ridiculous. Based on your measurements, a dump you took last night is only worth $20 Billion? That would mean Oracle is worth less than nothing...
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.
The code that would, say, communicate your -1 Offtopic mod to a external data archive system.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
Mike Hoye
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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!
Was I the only one thinking that?
An example: Toilet paper is middleware.
"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.
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.
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...
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. :-(
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".
It's perpendicular to tupperware.
> 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.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
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.
Middleware like you mentioned also helps keep a company SOX 404 compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
love is just extroverted narcissism
I do know exactly one company using OAS for in-house apps... but only one, and not for any good reason.
With any luck, this will eventually mean OAS will go away to be replaced by WebLogic. That would make sense, though... we'll see what Oracle actually does.
I'm still trying to make sense of using anything other than Tomcat, but some corps just like to spend money, I guess.
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.
Tomcat is my container of choice for servlets and JSPs...but it won't help you much as an EJB container unfortunately. That was, once upon a time, a big selling point for the BEA stack. And, probably not coincidentally, as EJB's began to acquire a bit of a bad smell in the J2EE community BEA became a bit less attractive an option given the alternatives available for the J2EE stack (JBoss anyone?)
ok, right... JBoss if you really need J2EE stuff. My experience? What most folks are doing can be done with Servlets alone, they just like buzzwords. There are definitely things you want a J2EE app server for, though...
JBoss is the answer, there. I stand corrected. I don't know why anyone would use anything besides JBoss or Tomcat. Thanks for the correction, I'm ashamed I let that slip.
is their enterprise service bus (ESB) which provides a web services infrastructure
I think I completely understand each individual word in that sentence, but I have no idea what it means as a collective sentence. How does an ESB providing a web service infrastructure differ from say the AMP part of the LAMP stack? A web server? A Java Server? A bunch of libraries built to enforce business rules? A framework like Hibernate or Spring? I don't do enterprise wide things, so I don't understand many of the enterprise needs per say, so I apologize if I said something really stupid.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
non technical people need acronym like middleware to explain things that sounds like magic to them.
Don't laugh, take it seriously otherwise you will end up in a tupperware.
Web 2.0 C'est chic!
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.
Thanks for the explanation. Somethings you just have to take apart, or build yourself to really understand. I've heard all of this before when talking about the possibilities of SOAP and web services in general.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
In any event BEAS used to be the best, their competition did catch up somewhat.
Sort of like Windows vs Linux - Windows doesn't crash as much as it used to :-)
"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
Oracle tried to build their own J2EE server (or maybe they bought some obscure one), but it has failed miserably. For the last 5 years, you either run an IBM J2EE stack (Websphere, DB2 usually on IBM hardware), open source (JBoss or Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Derby on GNU/Linux), or you use Oracle with WebSphere. This purchase has been expected for at least 5 years, not so Oracle can kill Websphere, but so they can have a decent J2EE server to compete against the integrated solutions offered by IBM and open source.
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