So, a while back, Oracle made a play for BEA at $17 per share. BEA told them to take a hike for anything under $21. Today, BEA caved at $19.375. That’s right, caved. When you offer someone a 25% premium and then later are able to buy them for only a 24% premium, you win. Yeah, they may be spending an extra $1.8 billion, but BEA is worth a lot more now. What does this mean? It depends on who you ask…

“Nothing to See Here”

So Bex posted earlier today on this and said that from a Content Management perspective, it doesn’t mean much. I tend to agree with him. Though, to be fair, my first reaction when I heard was Oh f**k! After all, WebLogic has always been my favorite Application Server. It was easy to maintain, upgrade, use, and scaled well. Now I’m concerned about what may happen to it in the future.

Bex also didn’t see much synergy. Aside from the minor annoyance with the patents, Bex saw Oracle acquiring a competitor more than expanding their offerings. Luckily for me, I had another perspective hammer at me.

“The Sky is Falling”

So I had a little debate earlier about what this meant with a colleague. He thought that this was a problem for EMC. His view was that this was putting EMC behind both Oracle and IBM in the space due to a lack of middleware and personalization capabilities. I conceded that this did give the SOA story for both companies a greater edge.

He kept focusing on the Portal piece. Apparently, there is a lot of grabbing in the market for a more personalized, portal-like, solution. I think that this more of the SharePoint vision. That isn’t a bad vision if you can get all the pieces to work together and scale. Let’s not forget the ability to scale.

Life is more than good stories though. This deal also isn’t executed yet. We don’t have any good ECM SOA standard yet. Without that, nobody wins. It looks like Bex may be starting to see that as well.