Oracle Buys BEA, This Time For Real
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While much of the tech world was watching Steve Jobs offer up a thinner notebook and listening to Intel offer some warnings about a tech slowdown, the execs at Oracle were quietly upping the ante for the takeover of BEA Systems. Putting some more chips on the table worked well as today the companies announced an $8.5 billion takeover of BEA. This was up a couple of billion (give or take a few hundred million) from a proposed takeover that was rebuffed last fall. BEA was one of the last big middleware players in a field that has seen middleware move from a headscratching "What is it?" type of tech to an integral part of CIO plans. With the financial industry in disarray and takeovers the name of the game, middleware which can tie together disparate systems becomes a make or break tech in acquisition success. Oracle now needs to quickly show that BEA's Weblogic product line and Oracle's Fusion software can be quickly integrated and provide a product whose sum is greater than the parts. In a prepared statement, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison indicated Weblogic and Fusion can play nicely together. |
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Comments (2)
The problem now is that the motivation that gave rise to a product such as BEA WebLogic and the middleware industry in general -- i.e., the J2EE standard -- has now been completely eliminated. A standard, with the hope of open development and no vendor lock-in, is not much good when there are only two mega vendors to choose from.
The good news is that there are open alternative stacks emerging, which are better suited for the age of scale-out, cloud computing.
See our Open Letter to BEA WebLogic Customers: http://gigapsacesblog.com
Posted by Geva Perry | January 18, 2008 12:59 PM
Hilarious. In almost one breath you say vendor lock-in, then go on to introduce a new GigaSpaces product! I work for Oracle and feel the combination of Oracle and BEA is going to be great for the Java dev community. Oracle middleware has been flying off the shelves and with the addition of the BEA dev community this will continue Oracle's efforts to compete with Microsoft--which happens to be where real vendor lock-in exists! I am not saying vendor lock-in is really all that bad. Microsoft is doing just fine with it.
A healthy community has this dialogue. However, I do not feel it is productive to scare people away from the Java EE standard by being an alarmist. Java is alive and well and there are well over a dozen vendors of JEE servers. Features and function, not fear, should drive people to your products.
Posted by Jim Basler | January 26, 2008 12:20 PM