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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."
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.
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
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
"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.
.... 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. :-(
The person who modded this troll has clearly never used Oracle. Believe me, if there's a source of evil it's Oracle.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
> 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.
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.
TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought. If not SAP.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
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.