Is Oracle’s proposal to acquire BEA a good idea for the user community?

Oracle Corp’s. $6.7 billion bid to buy BEA expired on Sunday night. Analyst companies across the pond in the USA are saying that this is only a postponement of an inevitable sale. What a sad situation this will be. What we really need is a monopoly commission to keep this from happening; IT IS NOT GOOD FOR THE INDUSTRY. We need to keep competition happening otherwise we will have no choice left.

If you are a BEA customer, probably the reason you choose BEA was to have an independent infrastructure from your database vendor—who is probably Oracle, or from your hardware vendor—who could be Sun Microsystems. As ex-Sun employees, BEA are both a partner and a competitor, but one where both companies can win. If Oracle eventually succeed what will this mean to the BEA user? I know Forrester Research issued a report this past week advising BEA customers to get ready for changes that are likely with the Oracle takeover. But do you want this to happen? Will you gain anything? Will it help you solve your business issues? I think not; it will delay both companies’ stated product development which you might be banking on.

If you are an Oracle customer, what will the takeover of BEA mean to you? Do you gain anything? Well, there could be a strengthening to some of the infrastructure elements. But there are an awful lot of product overlaps:

• Application Server
• Development Tools
• RFID Server
• BPM Server.

To name but 4.

Is this merger a good thing? From my personal viewpoint, I can’t see any real benefit that will gained by those of you using the software from both companies.