BEA Acquisition Thoughts

You may not be surprised to me hear me say this but I am really excited by Oracles recent acquisition of BEA, expected to complete in October of this year.  If you haven't read about it yet then here is the official Oracle announcement and press release.  On Wednesday Larry and Alfred took to the phone to explain the move to analysts (see transcript).  Already the pundits are giving their views which are generally positive.  Below are a few views I found on the net.

• Oracle Needs to Settle on a Growth Strategy Following BEA Acquisition
• What does Oracle's BEA acquisition mean to customers?
• The SOA implications of Oracle's BEA purchase
• Buy buy BEA - hello Oracle!
  

I think this is great news for a number of reasons.

• Firstly the combination of BEA and Oracle will really give IBM something to worry about in the middleware space, the combined company and product stack will show superiority over IBM in almost every area of middleware.
• Secondly the combination will provide a Java middleware powerhouse that will increasingly carry the fight to .Net, particularly in the user experience area.
• Thirdly it removes the chance of SAP buying BEA (I know they are chalk and cheese in philosophy and management styles but it was still a worry).
  
• Synergies will be easy to find.  Both BEA and Oracle have a strong standards focus.  It took Thomas Kurian to get Oracle Middleware firmly onto a standards based view of the world, but it is now there.  BEA has always had a strong standards based approach in its WebLogic range.  Because of these standards based appproaches key pieces of Fusion Middleware already run on the WebLogic, providing customers with lots of ways to rapidly combine the best of both Oracle and BEA middleware.  It will also enable the engineering teams to share a lot of functionality across what will probably become convergent platforms.
• Fusion Middleware has a "hot-pluggable" approach that allows components to be mixed and matched.  The acquistion of BEA will give a new impetus to making sure that "hot-pluggable" is easy and provides a mechanism
• From a purely selfish view it will let Oracle focus on its two main midleware competitors - Microsoft and IBM.

Of course we will have to wait for October 2008 for the deal to complete so we won't actually see any action on the ground until 2009, but then it will get interesting.

Disclaimer - these are my own views and not those of Oracle Corporation.