BEA Holds Its Ground After Oracle Rebuff
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After shooing away Oracleâs $6.7 billion takeover bid, BEA dug in its heels for a potentially disruptive battle with its largest shareholder, the activist investor Carl 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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Unwilling to sit back and let Oracle (Quote, Chart) grab all of the attention this week, BEA Systems (Quote, Chart) said a beta of its new application server, WebLogic Server 9.0, will be available for download next week.
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The application server space is heating up once again as both IBM and BEA Systems tout new versions of their platforms. With its Liquid Computing strategy, San Jose, Calif.
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BEA Systems said Monday that it would restate results to reflect expenses associated with misdated stock option grants.
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Oracle  withdrew its $6.7 billion bid for business software maker BEA Systems  on Sunday, setting the stage for a proxy battle between activist investor Carl Icahn and the BEA board.
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BEA Systems reiterated on Friday that it would not accept&#160;Oracle&#39;s $17 per share acquisition bid, and also said it would allow&#160;a deadline Oracle had set for Sunday 5 p.m. PDT&#160;to expire.
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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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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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Oracle&#160;on Tuesday morning said that BEA Systems has officially rejected its&#160;offer to acquire the company. BEA had previously said the&#160;offer was too low.
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InfoWorld - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft&#39;s .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday.
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Oracle has set a deadline for Sunday on its bid to buy BEA, which has officially rejected its $6.7 billion offer.
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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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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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Business software maker Oracle Corp. agreed Wednesday to buy BEA Systems Inc. for about $7.85 billion, a compromise price that ends a months-long dispute over the value of the company that pioneered Web services software.
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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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BEA Systems Inc  said on Friday it still cannot accept the $17-per-share takeover bid from Oracle Corp  as it significantly undervalues the business software maker.