BEA finally says yes to Oracle - for $8.5bn
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Larry flashes extra cash Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to buy BEA for $8.5bn.â¦
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$21 per share? You're having a laugh Oracle scoffed at BEA last night, describing the middleware's self-set $21 per share price tag as "impossibly high" and saying it had no intention of raising its offer.â¦
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Not to be outdone by rival Oracle, BEA Systems has unveiled version 9.0 of its WebLogic Server application server. Homing in on the theme of service-oriented architecture deployment, BEA said the product would
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(InfoWorld) - In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. Thatâs a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the companyâs stock price rose around 50 percent in the last year. But playing in a hot space such as SOA is a classic instance of having the tiger by its tail. As CEO Alfred Chuang told InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr in a recent interview, the company still needs to move aggressively to avoid being left high and dry by rapid shifts in the technology landscape. InfoWorld: What do you think is the future of enterprise software and where does BEA fits into it? Alfred Chuang: You will have vendors like us that will be selling platforms (and) application vendors that will be selling application components, yet they will be assembled on the fly by an end-user. End-users will be using a tool -- or they will be using templates or processes -- that will represent what their environment is. They can always go back to change the process on the fly, yet the components will continue to be usable within those processes. One big advantage: Youâll be able to upgrade component functionality without affecting the process itself. Today, this is a total mess. IW: Where do you think SaaS (software as a service) will fit in to this vision?                                                     AC: Like when you rent a car, you donât really care much about your car. When people drive a rent-a-car, they drive very differently from when they drive their own car. You see the craziest man driving around the hills of San Francisco in a Ford Taurus -- itâs likely to be me -- and Iâm killing the brakes coming down the streets of San Francisco, flying over the hills, because I donât give a crap. Now, if itâs my own car that Iâm driving, itâs very different. Iâll be parking at the corner parking station and making sure nobody can possibly ding me. There will be people who want full flexibility, so all they want is a rental car. There are people who will want ownership so badly ... that they will buy the software. SaaS will be able to attract small groups in large corporations, or small organizations, period. I think a successful company, including ourselves, even at the middleware layer, will have to offer both to people. IW: So youâre not ruling out offering some of what BEA offers now as a service? AC: Not only am I not ruling it out, we have to do it.Â  Iâm saying itâs not going to be 100 percent of the world. IW: What about the effect of the open source model? AC: Open source is the ultimate tool to keep us honest, especially on pricing. Linux is a good example. I spent the first half of my career from the very beginning of Sun until they were several billion dollars in size. For the longest time, Solaris was the reason people would buy a very, very expensive box. All of a sudden, people did not notice -- especially the people at Sun -- that the API was no longer dependent on Solaris. Weâre not calling any of the functions directly on the operating system anymore. They are programming that to things like J2EE. So overnight, what happened is someone came up with a computer running an operating system that J2EE can run on. Literally, thereâs no porting, thereâs no changing, nothing. In fact, the same application is being extended by buying more CPUs running Linux. Linux totally commoditized Unix in the marketplace. Open source serves [another] very important purpose, I think, which is education. SOA [service-oriented architecture] is lifting us to a different level. Look at the application server or integration software. You really want to educate developers? Let them tinker with whatâs inside so they fully understand what theyâre dealing with. A smart vendor will always watch whether their software is being commoditized. And itâs not wrong to be commoditized as long as your volume catches up with it. You must continue to innovate in abstractions at higher and higher levels. The demand is unlimited at this point in time. Look at our appetite for Internet applications. It is absolutely insatiable. We want more and more and more. I want to do everything on the Internet. If Iâm booking an airline ticket -- I just came back from Asia last night -- I did the whole thing in my car on my 3G BlackBerry.
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Business software maker BEA Systems Inc  has agreed to be acquired by Oracle Corp  for $8.5 billion, a 14 percent premium to its first offer, the companies said on Wednesday.
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Oracle has rejected&#160;BEA Systems&#39; proposed purchase price of $21 per share, calling it &quot;impossibly high&quot; for Oracle or any other company to pay.
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BEA Systems&#39; board of directors has named an acquisition price to competitor and suitor Oracle: $21 a share, $4 more than Oracle&#39;s initial offer.&quot;We continue to believe that&#160;Oracle&#39;s unsolicited proposal to acquire BEA&#160;at $17.00 per share significantly&#160;undervalues BEA, and is therefore not in the best interests of BEA shareholders,&quot; the company said in a statement Thursday.Oracle on Tuesday set a deadline&#160;of Sunday for BEA to accept its &quot;generous&quot; original bid, which totals about $6.7 billion. The company also indicated it had no interest in a protracted merger battle.But BEA declared Thursday that the company&#39;s existing assets and future business prospects dictate a significantly higher sale price. The company said it has customers for its array of enterprise software among 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500, along with $1 billion in cash reserves and no debt.BEA said it arrived at the $21-per-share figure after talking to its financial advisor, Goldman Sachs. The company said it has authorized its attorneys to give a draft merger agreement to third parties willing to meet the price. The agreement would &quot;provide for an appropriately high degree of certainty of closing,&quot; BEA said.A successful purchase of BEA would significantly increase Oracle&#39;s standing in the middleware space. While some BEA assets would help round out Oracle&#39;s offerings, the companies overlap in key categories like Web servers and ESB (enterprise service bus) products.
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BEA Systems Inc  said on Thursday it is willing to sell itself for $8.2 billion, but the price was rejected as "impossibly high" by Oracle Corp , the only company that has publicly expressed interest in the software maker.
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The European commission yesterday approved Oracle Corp&#39;s proposed $7.7bn hostile takeover of rival software company PeopleSoft, clearing the last competition hurdle to the deal.
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PeopleSoft finally gave in yesterday and accepted a $10.3bn (Â£5.4bn) takeover proposal from its larger rival Oracle, ending a pursuit that has lasted 18 months and has been marked by bitter personal insults and a series of courtroom battles.
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Business software maker BEA Systems has agreed to be acquired by Oracle Corp for $8.5 billion, ending a long negotiation over the value of the company.
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BEA Systems Inc  said on  Thursday it is prepared to sell itself for $8.2 billion, which  is a 24 percent premium to a bid from Oracle Corp  that  the business software maker rejected.
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Mixes with new crowd Oracle is ending its brief acquisition lull with one of its largest software deals. The database giant will buy Hyperion Solutions, also an Oracle competitor in the business intelligence market and an important partner of SAP, for $3.3bn, or $52 a share - a handsome 21 per cent premium for stockholders.â¦
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Not to be outdone by rival Oracle's conference being held a block away, BEA Systems on Monday unveiled Version 9.0 of its WebLogic Server application server, code-named Diablo.
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On the same day its plans to&#160;buy middleware giant BEA Systems&#160;rocked the technology world, Oracle also revealed Wednesday that its string of niche acquisitions will continue through the purchase of document-capture vendor Captovation.
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At an asking price of nearly $8 billion, BEA Systems was finally talked into an Oracle buyout. But with Oracle's long history of software buyouts, will it cut BEA -- and its many business customers -- enough slack?
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'I want to be wooed' BEA invited Oracle to play kiss-chase yesterday, as the database vendor came over all tough and macho in its effort to acquire the middleware firm.â¦