Friday, October 12th was a pretty exciting day in the SOA vendor world, with Oracle declaring it was willing to pony up close to $7 billion for middleware company BEA Systems. "Not good enough," BEA responded. (Maybe they'll accept my counter-offer -- I'll keep you posted...)
Rumors have been swirling around for months about someone picking up BEA, and Carl Icahn's snatching up a quarter of the stock meant something big was about to go down.
As Tony Baer points out here at ebizQ, BEA has been in a tough spot for some time.
Middleware has always been a tough business. It gets even tougher when your competitors start giving away similar products at low or no cost. BEA's bread-and-butter product, WebLogic, is rapidly rapidly being commoditized by the open-source Java Enterprise Edition application servers (JBoss, Glassfish, et al). It's former flagship product, Tuxedo, is a mainframe play.
Still, to its credit, BEA has remained viable in this tough business, offering integration solutions for companies in the midst of wrestling with SOA. And it has been very successful at staying in the vanguard of service-orientation. BEA has long equated itself as the "Switzerland" of technology.
What would Oracle do with BEA? Would BEA products be folded under Oracle's Fusion middleware? Tony believes the prime products will end up there.
What advantages would this bring to Oracle, which already has a wide array of SOA middleware, not too mention all the other acquisitions it has brought under its umbrella? And most importantly, what will be the impact on users?
Oracle rightly recognizes that SOA is their future. In fact, SOA could put them out of business someday. Companies are learning to use SOA layers as workarounds to proprietary ERP systems and databases. Oracle, like SAP, needs to own the middleware space that threatens to subsume its bread-and-butter products.
Oracle's PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions have left a lot of unfinished business; namely customer bases that are resigned to the fact that they will be forced to eventually upgrade into more Oracle-centric environments. Oracle is maintaining these products in a semi-autonomous state, and promises to keep supporting them. However, it's hard to imagine BEA's products and brand not being absorbed into Oracle Fusion. Will BEA customers stay with the new regime, if the acquisition were to go through?
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