Turns out Oracle really wanted BEA Systems after all, enough to pay a 24 percent premium over Tuesday’s closing price for BEA shares. The database giant said today it would pay $19.38 a share in cash, which values the deal at $8.5 billion including the $1.3 billion in cash BEA already has on hand.
BEA (BEAS) and Oracle (ORCL) got into an intense game of chicken back in October, starting with a $17-per-share offer from Oracle. BEA scoffed at the price, asking instead for $21 per share. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he wouldn’t offer more for the middleware provider, and Oracle walked away.
But the reality of software consolidation and pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn appears to have pushed BEA back to the negotiating table. And Oracle’s offer was…well, the only one out there. BEA shareholders seem happy, though: At last check, shares of BEA were up more than 19%, at $18.56; shares of Oracle had added 8 cents to change hands for $21.39.
7 comments so far
9:20 AM PT
Oracle’s BEA acquisition is a ho-hum big money purchase of a declining player. Compare and contrast that with Sun’s brilliant game changing move to acquire MySQL for much less cash. The ramifications for the two companies are quite interesting. Oracle was afraid to cannibalize its own business, now someone else will.
More on my blog:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/mysql-and-bea-oracle-and-sun-will-be-at-each-others-throats/
Best,
BW
9:58 AM PT
[...] Oracle buys BEA. See GigaOM. [...]
10:30 AM PT
Now HP will go for Tibco and SAP will probably buy IDS Scheer so that Oracle looses its BPM modelling tool again.
11:54 AM PT
[...] ability to offer an alternative to proprietary software. The purchase, while smaller than the $8.5 billion Oracle-BEA deal that was also unveiled today, is notable because MySQL was a highly anticipated IPO candidate, and had long rebuffed suitors [...]
9:50 AM PT
There is a paradoxical effect here: As the middleware market consolidates, and specifically the J2EE vendors, the original motivations which gave rise to products such as BEA WebLogic are being eliminated. Those were that an open standard allows proliferation of product development and no vendor lock-in. With two mega-vensors, IBM and Oracle, that’s no longer the case.
This why there are now new middleware stack that are open and better suited for the coming age of scale-out, cloud computing and simplicity of development.
See our Open Letter to BEA WebLogic Customers: http://www.gigaspacesblog.com
Geva Perry
GigaSpaces
11:10 AM PT
[...] Oracle вновь сесть за стол переговоров. Oracle в итоге заплатил $19.38 за акцию, однако в данной ситуации все равно ушел со стола [...]
3:08 PM PT
[...] that this is “a very strong but serious negotiating tactic.” And in mid-January, Oracle won a similar game of chicken with BEA Systems. Oracle walked away from the deal in October when BEA [...]
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