Tuesday, January 22, 2008

BEA & Oracle product lines

Oracle came back with another offer to BEA last week and made a deal. I don't want to meditate on pros-and-cons of this acquisition, just to make my personal prediction about future of middleware product line of this joint enterprise (don't read further if you don't like this kind of forecasting ;)
I'm positive regarding WebLogic Server as there is a broad acceptance of this application server contrary to the Oracle one. Not so sure with WebLogic Integration because of Oracle BPEL Process Manager (former Collaxa BPEL Server) and its standards-based approach. On the other hand, WLI has a broader feature set, but honestly, do we need it? In area of ESB, AquaLogic Service Bus is a clear winner for me, with an extensive support of different types of services. BPM is much more fuzzy to me because BEA ALBPM (even it's a great product) might not fit well into Oracle BPA Suite, an analytical and modelling platform. And finally area of SOA registries/repositories: both Oracle Registry and BEA ALSR are OEM versions of HP Systinet Registry so there is no clash. There is no real Oracle repository, thus BEA ALER is a winner.
In summary, I don't think WebLogic and AquaLogic platforms are intended just for maintanence, but will replace (or coexist with) some of the Oracle's actual products.
Update: After reading several "Oracle&BEA" posts saying nothing, I've found a nice summary of opinions about middleware future under flag of Oracle.

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Monday, October 15, 2007

BEA rejected Oracle's offer

Oracle's courting to BEA resulted next week in a bid of $6.7 billion in cash. The bid was shortly after rejected by BEA as too low.
Personally, I'm very glad, because portfolio of BEA and Oracle products seems to me quite overlapping and I do not want to see some of the BEA's to be thrown over and replaced by Oracle's (but the other way round, Oracle AS in a garbage, not so bad idea ;). Tell me, who needs four different portals?
P.S. As a BEA contractor, I might be slightly biased ;)

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