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:

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.

Comments

2 Responses to “The other shoe finally drops for Oracle and BEA”

  1. Daniel Weinreb on January 17th, 2008 8:30 am

    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.

  2. Oracle’s evolution — overview | Software Memories on October 3rd, 2012 5:18 pm

    […] 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 […]

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