It's official... Oracle purchased BEA for $7.85 billion dollars... that's a 24% premium over BEA's stock price. Not bad... although they paid a higher premium to purchase Stellent ;-)

They made the same offer in October for a 25% premium... but in the past 3 months BEA's stock price rose a bit. So Oracle has to pay $19.375 per share instead of the previously offered $17.

People have been analyzing this for months... there's not much reason for Oracle to purchase BEA: there's limited synergy between their product lines. In fact a lot of them are in direct competition. However, BEA has a lock on middleware for the financial services industry. Its probably worth it for Oracle to take out their #1 competitor, and increase their customer base.

I doubt most of BEA's customer base would be willing to switch off the Weblogic application server in favor of OC4J... however I can see how Oracle Coherence would be a big seller. Not to mention Oblix identity management, and of course their database. Other than that, its probably on a case-by-case basis...

What's this mean for Content Management? Not much... other than the fact that Oracle now owns BEA's patents on JSR170 and JSR283 extensions. Yep, BEA wisely decided that those Content management "standards" were pretty sucky, and decided to make them work. They did the same for J2EE back in the day... but, as Pie Guy noted, a Java centric API standard for content management is doomed from the start. People want coherent services, not complex standards... so I doubt much will come of it.

(Hat tip Cordell)

UPDATE: Conflicting reports... some news outlets say $7.2 billion, others say $8.5 billion. I blame that wacky dollar fluctuation...

UPDATE 2: Just an observation... BEA is almost entirely middleware. Oracle's Middleware sales in 2007 were projected to be $1.5 billion. So, Oracle spent over five times their current middleware revenue to purchase their main middleware competitor. I'm very curious to see how this pans out...