While much of the tech world was watching Steve Jobs offer up a thinner notebook and listening to Intel offer some warnings about a tech slowdown, the execs at Oracle were quietly upping the ante for the takeover of BEA Systems. Putting some more chips on the table worked well as today the companies announced an $8.5 billion takeover of BEA. This was up a couple of billion (give or take a few hundred million) from a proposed takeover that was rebuffed last fall.
BEA was one of the last big middleware players in a field that has seen middleware move from a headscratching “What is it?” type of tech to an integral part of CIO plans. With the financial industry in disarray and takeovers the name of the game, middleware which can tie together disparate systems becomes a make or break tech in acquisition success.
Oracle now needs to quickly show that BEA’s Weblogic product line and Oracle’s Fusion software can be quickly integrated and provide a product whose sum is greater than the parts. In a prepared statement, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison indicated Weblogic and Fusion can play nicely together.