Market has been abuzz with rumors about BEA for some time now. There has been speculation about BEA open sourcing its java offerings and then there have been rumors about it getting acquired. The latest is the news about Oracle’s offer to acquire BEA for $ 6.66 bn.
There is considerable overlap in Oracle’s and BEA offerings. Oracle has multiple portal (like) products – Portal and Webcenter. BEA also has Weblogic and Aqualogic (erstwhile Plumtree) products. Both also have strong offerings in Application Server and SOA. There are some things that Oracle will get – like BEA has Fuego for Business Process Management (BPM) that could become part of Oracle Fusion. Also, BEA did not have any enterprise level CMS offering and there will now probably be a better integration with Stellent to offer an end to end portal/CM platform.
Going by what Oracle has done with other acquisitions – Peoplesoft, Siebel, JD Ed etc, I think they will maintain the two product lines separately for quite some time. IBM is also doing the same with FileNet and its own CMS products. Both the product lines have many customers and Oracle would not let go of that revenue stream. However, it will be difficult for their sales folks to convince customers why they should select 1 out of their 4 portal products.
I think it’s getting hard for Oracle to continue with its own portal product line.
As Oracle portal is way behind when compared to present day portals and with webcenter, neither the target customer are clearly defined nor the product itself is matured enough to satisfy present day intranet/internet business requirements.
Also, I feel that any service provider will think twice before recommending Oracle portal products.
At the same time both aqualogic and weblogic are established name in the portal market. Oracle is going to have a blast and $$$ if both the weblogic and aqualogic comes under its hood, as somebody said “more and better products to sell”.