Oracle continues round of acquisitions with the bid for BEA

Filed in archive merger and acquisition on November 2, 2007

You may have read my earlier post on the overview of the market for enterprise software and applications and the role of Oracle. As I mentioned there, Oracle´s strategy for growth is based acquisitions and crazy rate of company purchasing by Oracle (More than 30 companies in the last 3 years!) has been a major force in consolidation of the market solutions.

What Oracle does is really simple: It buys the company, fires administrative people and keeps the engineers, and upsells its services to the new customer base. This way, it benefits from new sales revenue and also savings in administrative force costs.

Well the strategy of Oracle hasn´t changed and the newest evidence is the bid for BEA. Two weeks ago, the software giant disclosed a $6.7 billion unsolicited offer to buy BEA Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley company that helped build the market for Web-services software according to Wall Street Journal. The bid, a 25% premium to BEA's closing price.

Last year, IBM had 32% share of the middleware market, compared with 10% for BEA and 9% for Oracle, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Buying BEA would make Oracle the No. 2 middleware vendor after IBM. This is quite interesting news regarding the market situation because the result would be a battle between SAP and its competing NETWEAVER platform and Oracle´s new set of services.