On January 16, 2008, Oracle Corporation announced that it will purchase BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. The announcement comes three months after BEA rejected an initial offer of $17 a share. The new offer of $19.38 a share is 14% higher than the original, and 24% higher than the closing price of $15.58 on the day the deal was made.

BEA is leading provider of enterprise Java servers with WebLogic and its related support products. Oracle is known for their enterprise database products that integrate well with Java servers. This acquisition makes Oracle the leader in enterprise middle-ware technology.

How well will this purchase fare with existing BEA product customers? There is good reason to believe that BEA will benefit from the deal and so will their customers. More importantly, as part of Oracle, BEA will have the financial support to withstand market pressures from other enterprise Java server providers like IBM WebSphere, Red Hat JBoss, as well as Microsoft Windows Server, and SQL Server.

References

http://www.oracle.com/bea/index.html