As Ben Huff says, Oracle Coherence would be a big seller. In fact, many BEA customers already use Coherence, and I only heard good things about it. BEA considered acquiring it (Tangosol) many times, but never did it; one reason was that BEA’s business development people were just too busy at the time to give it enough attention. Congratulations to Cameron Purdy of Tangosol on the Oracle acquisition. Cameron says his unit is doing just great under Oracle leadership. (As do my friends at SleepyCat, also recently acquired by Oracle; Oracle is largely keeping their hands off and letting these guys continue to do the great job they do, in the way that they’ve been doing it. Good for them!)

It would seem to me that surely Oracle’s main goal here is to get BEA’s customers, who are very impressive companies that do very advanced software work, especially the financial service guys. I got to meet the techies at those companies, when I was at BEA, and many of them are awesome. I suppose the financial companies realize these days how dependent they are on their IT and have done their homework to hire great people.

One reason that BEA has a presence in China is that they wanted to sell there, and the Chinese government said that a precondition was that BEA must do software development there, too. I think that’s smart of the gov’t; they want to develop talent in their country. Another influencing factor is that the CEO (Alfred Chuang) is ethnically Chinese, as is the VP Eng (what’s his name, from CA).

I can’t wait to see how Oracle shakes things up at BEA.