Dude, you stole my joke!
October 15: We know what BEA is — now it is just a matter of negotiating the price
October 25: We’ve already established what you are, now we’re just working out a price
The news in the latter is that BEA has admitted it.
Note: Of course, the original joke is so old as to be variously attributed to all of George Bernard Shaw (most credibly), Winston Churchill, and Oscar Wilde.
| Categories: Application servers, Humor, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
We know what BEA is — now it is just a matter of negotiating the price
After the long Oracle/Peoplesoft drama, I don’t see any likely way the Oracle bid for BEA will end with anything other than a rather rapid acquisition of BEA, probably by Oracle.
But for now it’s not a done deal, as BEA is quite reasonably still haggling about price.
| Categories: Application servers, Oracle | 1 Comment |
More on the Oracle-BEA deal
Jeff Nolan has a great post on the Oracle/BEA deal. Yeah, he still has some of his old SAP good/Oracle evil reflexes, but he can be forgiven those and the tinfoilhattishness associated with them. His analysis of sellers’ and buyers’ deal habits is revealing and sound. Ditto the start of his remarks on Oracle product delays and internal politics, and SAP/Oracle competition. Even better, nothing in his analysis seems to disagree with mine. 
What Oracle now needs to do is make Oracle Application Server be a seamless “upgrade” from Weblogic. Then they can integrate in whatever kitchen-sink stuff they want from Oracle data caching (already there), app and/or dev tool run times, TimesTen, Tangosol, and so on, creating an app server stack that’s a worthy counterpart to the Oracle database in how it meets high-end OLTP needs. Meanwhile, Weblogic should remain as a not-bloated app-server-for-the-rest-of-us. Read more
Oracle and BEA — sometimes I am waaaay early
Back in December, 2002, I wrote up the rationale for an Oracle acquisition of BEA. The deal finally seems like it may be happening. Oddly, when I proposed it then, I was accused by Oracle’s analyst relations department of being “unprofessional” for having the temerity to suggest it. And while the specific individual who threw that tantrum is long gone, I haven’t talked all that much with Oracle’s core server groups since … but I digress.
Actually, the logic of an Oracle/BEA deal now isn’t much different from what it was way back then. One exception is that in the intervening half-decade Oracle has acquired a formidable amount of experience in integrating large and/or technically overlapping acquisitions. Technically, however, the story remains pretty much the same. Oracle’s app server and BEA Weblogic do pretty similar things, more or less compliant to standards, only with different add-on functionality. And BEA’s most important add-ons are in an area — integration with outside applications — where Oracle has long needed to improve.