Oracle's $8 billion acquisition of BEA can mean only one thing. Fusion has failed. Let's face it, if its Fusion middleware was on track, Oracle would have no need to speed billions of dollars buying the market-leader in Java application server middleware - particularly given that the economy looks set for a downturn.
There does appear to be a lot of cross-over between Oracle and BEA products. From what I have seen, BEA's Aqualogic web portal product seems to be doing quite well.
Oracle has an appetite for software and has swallowed up several companies with similar products in the last few years such as Siebel, PeopleSoft (including JD Edwards, which PeopleSoft had acquired). The UK Oracle User Group found in December that users of these products were, in general, pretty satisfied.
But, these acquisitions some how fitted neatly into the company's integration strategy Fusion and the Fusion web services middleware.
So now, with the acquisition of BEA and the mightly Weblogic application server, where does that leave those users? Confused…
