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This just in: Oracle may need the BEA Glue more than ever as Fusion falters:
Oracle loses head of Fusion development October 8th, 2008.
So now in the SitzKrieg – Oracle can figure out how badly it needs BEA glue and BEA can wait for the tading tading tading of a better bid.
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Updated October 20th, 2007
eWeek has chronicled the “courting” of BEA by Oracle ($6.7B semi hostile bid); but Infoworlds David Margulis has hit the spot with his top ten reasons why Oracle will prevail in taking over BEA. I really like these three among Davids reasons:
9) Oracle has buffed its own image by essentially leaving the PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards products intact, after initially scaring the crap out of everybody with its early (con)fusion plans.
7) Oracle actually needs bona-fide, application-neutral middleware now, to tie together all the disparate legacy platforms it is now selling. So to customer CTOs, the deal makes a lot of sense, adding best of breed glue to Oracle’s mix.
3) IBM won’t counter-bid, because they’re already bigger in middleware than Oracle and BEA put together. To them, the software’s a commodity – it’s the human talent that deploys it that customers pay a premium for.
Davids arguments are pretty compelling but here is my top 5 list why I think HP will be white knight to BEA and make a higher counter bid:
1)HP is now bigger than IBM in revenues and needs to grow them; they have been taking the software root of late with Mercury Interactive etc;
2)Despite the Bluestone fiasco of nearly a decade ago; BEA is top value middleware: from SOA through BPM to transaction processing and lots of dashboard and portal territory in between;
3)If HP is serious about SOA; this is the best buy by far – it puts HP at the head of not just SOA but also middleware class;
4)SOA and ESB helps sell servers and storage; HP has lots of servers and storage infrastructure to sell;
5)HP has at least $8B in positive working capital and projected cashflow income to spare – they can easily afford a counter bid to Oracles low-ball first offer.
So lets see what happens now that the phony Sitzkrieg of “nothings up” continues this week between BEA and Oracle.