January 16, 2008
The other shoe finally drops for Oracle and BEA
As previously noted, I’ve been writing about an Oracle/BEA merger since 2002. So like many observers, I find I have little more to say on the subject. Let’s go straight to the bullet points:
- Congratulations to Bill Janeway, Cary Davis and the rest of the Warburg Pincus team. They started BEA with a buyout of the ancient Tuxedo TP monitor. They aggressively bought Weblogic. They navigated the many changes in the core definition of the app server market. They recovered from the stumble in app dev tools. Yes, management ultimately is responsible, but great investors and board members had a lot to do with this one.
- TIBCO is an obvious candidate to go next, with all the major elements — significant middleware, unclear business model going forward, plus some minor sexy acquisitions (e.g., Spotfire) and internal efforts (e.g., in CEP) anybody would like to own.
- Bex Huff says BEA has a “lock” on middleware for the financial services industry.
- Tim Bass notes that Oracle picks up a CEP product in the deal. In general, Oracle is potentially a major threat in the CEP business. High-end transaction processing is what it does. And TimesTen’s core market is directly adjacent to CEP.
- Ray Wang notes that BEA has a big presence in China. He also thinks SAP’s NetWeaver is in trouble.
- The three obvious buyers for SAP are Microsoft, HP, and IBM, probably in that order.
My prior coverage of the Oracle/BEA merger includes a brag about having called it back in 2002, a quick analysis of how Oracle should reconcile its various products, and an obvious joke.
Categories: HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Oracle TimesTen, SAP AG
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
2 Responses to “The other shoe finally drops for Oracle and BEA”
Leave a Reply
During around 2002-2006, there was lots of talk around BEA of who might acquire us, with Oracle being at the top of the list. Larry Ellison had been quoted in the press saying something like “Why on earth would I want BEA? They have no value.” or something like that. We never took that seriously.
As Ben Huff says, Oracle Coherence would be a big seller. In fact, many BEA customers already use Coherence, and I only heard good things about it. BEA considered acquiring it (Tangosol) many times, but never did it; one reason was that BEA’s business development people were just too busy at the time to give it enough attention. Congratulations to Cameron Purdy of Tangosol on the Oracle acquisition. Cameron says his unit is doing just great under Oracle leadership. (As do my friends at SleepyCat, also recently acquired by Oracle; Oracle is largely keeping their hands off and letting these guys continue to do the great job they do, in the way that they’ve been doing it. Good for them!)
It would seem to me that surely Oracle’s main goal here is to get BEA’s customers, who are very impressive companies that do very advanced software work, especially the financial service guys. I got to meet the techies at those companies, when I was at BEA, and many of them are awesome. I suppose the financial companies realize these days how dependent they are on their IT and have done their homework to hire great people.
One reason that BEA has a presence in China is that they wanted to sell there, and the Chinese government said that a precondition was that BEA must do software development there, too. I think that’s smart of the gov’t; they want to develop talent in their country. Another influencing factor is that the CEO (Alfred Chuang) is ethnically Chinese, as is the VP Eng (what’s his name, from CA).
I can’t wait to see how Oracle shakes things up at BEA.
[…] particular, Oracle bought huge numbers of software vendors — PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA, and many more. And then Oracle went further, bundling hardware as well — but that brings us […]