Oracle has finally bought BEA, reports Reuters, as Larry Ellison continues his "consolidation" of the enterprise software market. Basically the two companies split the difference. Oracle offered $17 last year, BEA said $21, and they did the deal for $19.375 per share in cash.
In 2005, Oracle bought Siebel for $5.85 billion, and shortly before that, picked up PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards for $11.1 billion, and Hyperion for $3.3 billion. It has also picked off a few dozen smaller companies such as Tangosol, AppForge, LoadStar, Agile, Bharosa, NetSure, Bridgestream, LogicalApps, Oblix, MetaSolv, Thor Technologies, HotSip, OctetString, Retek, G-log, Sleepycat Software, InnoDB, SPL WorldGroup and Collaxa, which are too small for anyone to bother about. (Even open source users don't seem too bothered about Oracle buying up open source database vendors.)
According to Forbes, late last year Oracle president Charles Phillips said they'd bought 41 companies in the past 45 months:
"At this point in our history, acquisition makes a lot more sense," Phillips said. "Companies are cheaper than in the Internet bubble. We can bring in innovation outside of Oracle. Anyone remotely thinking about selling their company is going to come to us. We've become the IPO market for the enterprise software industry."
Of course, Oracle's main rival, IBM, is also hugely rich and acquisitive, and will probably gobble up almost anything Oracle misses. So it looks as though the market will be split between IBM and Oracle, with SAP standing alone. But there are still a few tiddlers, such as Sun (which has just bought MySQL, after it turned Oracle away) and Microsoft.
