Gary Barnett's Blog

So, BEA and Oracle have come to a price both can agree on – I did blog this a while ago, and after destroying my wordpress install have managed to lose the original post.

So when I say “Well I reckoned that $20.00 a share was going to be the magic number, but hey I was pretty close given it went for $19.38!” It’s ok to say “You lying little scamp, you’re just saying that…”

But I did. Honest!

/* I’ve now managed to find a back-up of the original thinkovation database, and have restored the original Oracle/BEA Post */

My wordpress incompetence aside…

I still think that this is a good thing… But there are plenty of challenges ahead of the Oracle and BEA teams. I know it’s ancient history, but I have painful memories of going to visit the NetDynamics and Netscape (Kiva) teams at Sun, soon after the “merged” app server was announced. I ended up meeting the teams separately – and got the impression that all the NetDynamics guys really wanted to talk about was how rubbish Kiva was, and the Kiva guys did the opposite..

Back to today… There are now two pretty rich and fully fledged middleware offerings in the mix;

• Oracle’s Fusion is strong but badly described, and hasn’t got much traction outside Oracle’s well understood and well sold-to customer base.
• BEA’s Aqualogic story is also strong… and better described

The problem now is …. how do you merge the two technology sets… Ellison is quoted in a Washington Post article as saying that while both companies have “numerous” middleware offerings, BEA’s line is nonetheless “overwhelmingly complementary,”.

I guess that I’d say that if I was Larry Ellison too – But it’s really not that accurate a statement…

As Micheal Meehan points out in his commentary if the deal goes through Oracle will be the proud owner of;
2 ESB products

2 BPM products

2 Portals

2 SOA stacks

2 Data integration platforms

2 Development tools

Even if you step back and let your eyes go out of focus… that’s still two pretty overlapping sets of technology.

In fairness, Oracle has a better track record than some (Sun for instance) where it comes to taking the tough decisions that are needed when merging products – and it’s going to have some tough decisions to make.

Meanwhile – IBM’s Websphere still has the #1 slot, by some margin. At best Oracle bumps up to #2 in the J2EE middleware space – And to number three if you talk about platform middleware and don’t exclude Microsoft’s .NET – Which by my (admittedly wet finger in the air) reckoning is grossly overlooked, or grossly under-estimated by most analysts.

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