BEA Systems in Fight With Icahn
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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29 -- After shooing away Oracle's $6.7 billion takeover bid, BEA Systems dug in its heels for a potentially disruptive battle with its largest shareholder, activist investor Carl C. Icahn.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26  â The business software maker BEA Systems signaled its intent to let Oracleâs $6.7 billion takeover bid expire Sunday, setting the stage for a showdown with its largest shareholder, the billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn.
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'This will hurt you more than it hurts me' Oracle let its $17 per share offer for BEA lapse yesterday, but activist investor Carl Icahn has demanded the middleware firm put the offer to shareholders anyway.â¦
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After shooing away Oracle Corp.'s $6.7 billion takeover bid, business software maker BEA Systems Inc. dug in its heels for a potentially disruptive battle with its largest shareholder, activist investor Carl Icahn.
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Mylan Laboratories Inc. may have found the white knight it needs to check Carl Icahn&#39;s attempts to kill its $4 billion plan to acquire King Pharmaceuticals Inc.
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Carl Icahn has launched another of his multibillion-dollar shock-and-awe raids for a company - this time on the nation&#39;s biggest generic drug maker, Mylan.
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The pressure is on for companies hoarding enormous amounts of cash. Investor activists like Carl Icahn have been hounding cash-rich companies to put their unspent dollars to use for their shareholders.
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PITTSBURGH Carl Icahn, the largest shareholder of Mylan Laboratories, is now threatening to push for new company directors to stop the generic drug maker&#39;s four (B) billion-dollar takeover bid of King Pharmaceuticals.
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BEA Systems at the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday is adding the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open source development initiative.
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Integration 101 Mini Poll Well, the shareholders succumbed in the end, and BEA is now to be part of the mighty machine that is Oracle (see here if you missed the news). This probably didn't come as that much of a surprise to the pundits, and the BEA shareholders must obviously think they're getting a good deal. Beyond the wheeling, dealing and competitive shenanigans, though, we'd be interested in your views of how the move is likely to impact those that matter the most â the customers.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Capitalizing on the industry's virtualization trend, BEA Systems has fashioned a per-instance model for its virtualization software in an attempt to do what a company official said better reflects usage patterns. The strategy affects BEA WebLogic Server -- Virtual Edition. Instead of a per-CPU pricing based on the deployment of the software, users instead will pay $13,000 for each instance of the application server running in its own virtual machine, said Mark Pritchard, BEA director of product marketing for BEA virtualization tools. "We believe [the pricing model] is unique in the industry," Pritchard said. WebLogic Server -- Virtual Edition is a Java environment for virtualized hardware. Featuring BEA's application server, a Java Virtual machine and operating system compression, more applications per server are enabled. The product is shipping now. "What we realized is that once we moved into this new world of virtualization, we need to think again about how we price our software," said Pritchard. For applications running on dedicated servers, CPU-based pricing is common, he noted. But virtualization breaks new ground. "The reality is that virtualization opens up many exciting new opportunities about how customers can choose to deploy their applications and how they can respond to business and operational needs in a flexible way," Pritchard said. The CPU-based pricing model is not appropriate as customers moved to virtualized data centers, according to Pritchard. The per-instance model is suited for disaster recovery scenarios and where an application workload changes over time, Pritchard explained. BEA's per-instance plan "absolutely makes sense," said Chris Wolf, senior analyst at Burton Group. "It's not uncommon for a virtual machine cluster to be comprised of physical servers with different CPU characteristics (two-way, four-way, etc)," Wolf said. "That being said, simply having a VM fail over from a two-way server to a four-way server would violate WebLogic licensing per the old model. The new licensing model is much more reflective of the modern virtualized data center and is one that other ISVs should follow." Asked if customers would end up paying more money to BEA under the new per-instance model, Pritchard noted that customers can deploy the software on systems running many CPUs. A customer may be deploying to a 16-CPU box, he said. "Here, your pricing is tied directly to how much you're using the software," Pritchard said. BEA will examine whether to price its other technologies using the same per-instance paradigm, but right now the plan is limited to the Virtual Edition, said Pritchard.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26  Â The business software maker BEA Systems signaled its intent to let Oracleâs $6.7 billion takeover bid expire Sunday, setting the stage for a showdown with its largest shareholder, the billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn.
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WebLogic flat One of the executives credited with helping stabilize BEA Systems is quitting as the company continues to iron out troubling kinks in its global sales operations.â¦
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Given the silence from the BEA Systems and Oracle camps early this week about Oracle's unsolicited proposal to buy its middleware rival, the community at large can only sit back and guess what might be the next scene in this drama.The two companies have been keeping quiet since last Friday's blockbuster revelation that Oracle was seeking to acquire BEA for $17 per share, or about $6.7 billion. Both have spurned requests this week for media briefings to elaborate on the issue.Undoubtedly, much is taking place behind the scenes, as aggressive Oracle seeks to add BEA to the impressive list of formerly independent companies it has acquired, which has included, among others, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. BEA, meanwhile, also has to be pondering its next step.Officials at Sun Microsystems, which invented the Java platform that serves as the backbone of many BEA and Oracle products, seemed to be caught off-guard when asked about the proposed merger at a Sun event in San Francisco on Tuesday evening.Chuckling, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software, suggested contacting Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about the matter. But when asked what impacts might be felt by the Java platform itself, Green did not see any negative effects."They're both Java supporters," Green said. "I think it's neutral to Java. I think it's just fine."Sun's James Gosling, a founder of Java and chief technology officer for Sun's client software group, concurred. "They're both big supporters of Java. I don't think it's going to have much effect one way or the other," Gosling said.Oracle has pledged to protect investments customers have made in BEA products. While Oracle's move has been characterized in some circles as a hostile takeover attempt, BEA's initial response merely said the Oracle offer undervalued the company.Major BEA stockholder Carl Icahn has been prodding for a sale of BEA, prompting one BEA insider to suggest Icahn did not have enough shares and would have a hard time getting control of the BEA board of directors in order to make the sale happen. Now, Oracle has forced BEA's hand. If history is any indication, the sale is likely to happen. PeopleSoft opposed Oracle but eventually succumbed."We certainly saw how persistent Oracle was in chasing PeopleSoft," said Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group, who expects the merger to be completed.Options for BEA to resist Oracle may be limited. To take the company private and avoid a merger, BEA would need to find a private equity partner, Callaghan said. And then there is Icahn, owning a significant stake in the company and wanting the company sold."It's not like [BEA CEO and co-founder] Alfred Chuang can regain control of the company and take it private. He's got to make his shareholders happy," said Callaghan.Even BEA employees could profit on a merger if they bought stock at a discounted price and then were able to sell it at an inflated price as a result of a merger, he said.? They might lose their jobs at BEA, but a lot of them would be very employable, winding up with startup ventures, he said.Callaghan added he expects Oracle to increase its offer. HP is a possibility as another potential buyer for BEA, but HP has had troubles of its own integrating acquired companies, such as Peregrine and Bluestone Software, Callaghan saidHe gave credence to the notion that Oracle may be buying BEA to stock up on its middleware offerings as the database market, which has been Oracle's cash cow, now features free, open source offerings from competitors.? "From what I understand, [databases is] not really a growing business at this point, Callaghan said.A dignitary in the Java development space had a mostly positive reaction to the proposed merger."Oracle and BEA both have amazing engineering teams, but Oracle's business operation is clearly many, many times the size and scale of BEA's," said Rick Ross, founder of the Javalobby Web site for Java developers. Having both teams under the same umbrella would create great opportunities for innovation, Ross said. And BEA's technology, such as the JRockit Java Virtual Machine, could become more widely used, he said.But there could be a down side, Ross noted."As the realized market share of a single player moves to such a dominant position, it becomes less and less likely that the startup innovator can gain a foothold," he said.IBM, BEA, and Oracle are battling in what research firm IDC calls the application deployment software space, which is comprised of application servers, integration software, message-oriented middleware and transaction processing monitors. This market space, valued at $9.4 billion in 2006, is growing at nearly 18 percent year over year because of trends in integration, business process management, and SOA, said Maureen Fleming, IDC program director.When including software mainframes, IBM last year had a 36 percent market share, valued at $3.3 billion. BEA trailed with 11 percent or $1 billion, and Oracle had 9 percent, or $850 million. The figures include license and maintenance revenuesWhen leaving out mainframe software, the market size dropped to $6.5 billion, with IBM still leading with a 20 percent market share, or $1.3 billion and Oracle garnering 13 percent or $850,000. BEA came in right behind Oracle with 12 percent or $840,000.
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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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The billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn has sued BEA Systems, demanding that the company hold an annual meeting and permit shareholders to vote on a sale.
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BEA Systems&#39; largest shareholder is demanding that its board of directors allow shareholders to vote on a&#160;$17-per-share purchase offer from Oracle, which is set to expire at 5 p.m. Pacific Time Sunday.