review of the proposed deal early.
It's now up to the BEA stockholders, who on Friday morning will vote on Oracle's $17 per share offer for the middleware giant -- an offer that was initially rejected but ultimately accepted by BEA's board of directors under pressure from Carl Icahn, a major technology investor and BEA's biggest stockholder.
SearchOracle.com recently spoke with Dennis Callaghan, an analyst with the New York City-based 451 Group, to find out what a finalized merger would mean for BEA and Oracle customers, and how the merger would affect Oracle's product portfolio. Here's what Callaghan had to say:
What will Oracle Fusion Middleware look like if BEA is brought into the Oracle fold?
Dennis Callaghan: Oracle would be wise to put [BEA WebLogic] at the center of Fusion Middleware, rather than their own application server. In terms of how the market has voted, there's really no comparison [between the two]. I would expect BEA's [Business Process Management] stuff to supersede anything Oracle's got. The portal product that emerges will most likely closely resemble that which
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Should BEA users be worried?
Callaghan: Oracle, despite its 'evil empire' image, has by most accounts done a pretty good job of developing and supporting PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel applications and [the company is] not forcing customers into a new and different application suite. I would expect they would do the same thing with BEA, given how prevalent WebLogic is vs. Oracle's own application server. The company also has tremendous [research and development] resources to put into these products. Oracle generated about $5.5 billion in cash last year, compared to about $100 million for BEA. The fact that this ended up being a friendly takeover should bode well for the BEA product set as well.
What does increased consolidation in IT marketplace mean for potential middleware buyers?
Callaghan: Consolidation always creates opportunities to look at new vendors. [IBM's WebSphere] passed WebLogic long ago as number one in application servers, it has a comprehensive middleware/SOA infrastructure around it and no one is going to acquire IBM. Red Hat-JBoss is becoming a much more mature and capable middleware offering/SOA backbone [and] by the very nature of open source is very responsive to customer needs, [although] I'm still concerned about the speed of their product development cycles. So, it never hurts to consider alternatives when there is any uncertainty about future product development plans.
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