Oracle acquires BEA

There was another acquistion announcement a few days ago. Oracle acquires BEA Systems for 8.5 billion dollars.. Wow ... a large amount of money. But this was obvious: It wasn´t the question if Oracle will buy BEA, it was the question when and at which price tag ... at least from my perspective. Sun didn´t need the products of BEA in it´s own portfolio as Glassfish gets better and better (okay, the Transaction Monitor would be nice, but you don´t buy a TM for 8.5 bn $). IBM has it´s well established Websphere product. Redhat has it´s JBoss. And then there is the Apache Foundation with Apache Geronimo.

Oracle had a little problem in thee past.When i talked with customers or colleagues, the Oracle Application Server is often described as a technical failure (to use friendly words). Thus Oracle had an open flank here. It was obvious, that Oracle would solve this problem by buying a better product portfolio. Oracle has the vision to deliver the complete software stack to their customers (from the OS to the ERP) and without a decent application server this vision would be incomplete. Thus BEA was an obivous prey for Larry.

PS: I still think we made the better deal with Mysql AB