Isn't life exciting! The corporate world of who marries who, and who are just sleeping together. :)
Investor Carl C Icahn will make money on this $8.5 billion acquisition in this recessionary or fearful climate.
Larry Ellison expects to make money from BEA assuming the BEA revenues will be robust even if there is a U.S. economic recession and he thought the two company's products would work together to become a market leader. Remember, BEA has very good reputation as well as market recognition in China.
At the same time, BEA or Oracle employees are worrying about their fate and their pocket of course.
Forrester research sees many opportunities for synergy in their market position and strategies:
- BEA and Oracle have many common customers
- BEA takes Oracle into high-end middleware
- BEA strengthens Oracle’s hand in telcos, brokerage, and big government
- BEA’s BPM and portal products run on .NET, as well as Java
- BEA and Oracle together can make a leading information fabric offering.
- Oracle and BEA have little partner conflict.
Gartner research believes Oracle would emerge as a portal, process and middleware vendor with revenue second in size only to IBM, the market leader, both of which will be the main players in the Java-centric middleware market, well ahead of Microsoft. But technically, they have significant overlap. like following points from SearchSOA:
- Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus
- Oracle BPA Suite, BEA AquaLogic BPM
- Oracle Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal
- Oracle Web Services Manager, BEA AquaLogic SOA Management
- Orace Data Integrator, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
- Oracle JDeveloper 10g, BEA Workshop
How well Oracle and BEA mix and match their two product lines could either help them gain more customers or send customer to alternatives. Is this going to be a happy marriage? Let us see.