Oracle will be doing a webcast on the BEA acquisition in about 30 minutes... finally telling the market what their plans are for integration of the 2 middleware stacks.

As I said before, from an ECM perspective, we couldn't have been happier about the BEA acquisition. I always preferred the WebLogic stack, and the Plumtree/Aqualogic folks always had some cool technology (even if it didn't always conform to "standards").

I got a bit of an early preview from other Oracle ACEs, but now we'll be able to talk about it. I'll be updating this page every few minutes with my thoughts.

• 10:33 -- logged in early to get a good spot. You know how it is. Preferred bandwidth to early arrivers.
• 11:00 -- can hear audio presentation, but no video... huh...
• 11:05 -- standard intro for every middleware presentation... complete, integrated, standards-based
• 11:08 -- Why buy BEA? They were a pioneer, they got SOA before mos folks, they understood middleware needed to evolve. Lots of industry and tech experts. Also, they helped Oracle expand into Asian markets
• 11:10 -- all BEA products will be supported. Trying to grow partners and ISVs. Pragmatic integrations between Oracle and BEA middleware products.
• 11:14 -- standard big numbers on number of customers, users, products, partners, product awards, yadda yadda. You've heard the shtick.
• 11:17 -- Oracle is trying hard to keep BEA employees to maintain continuity for existing BEA customers. Lots of quotes from excited customers and user community (read: Ari from IOUG).
• 11:19 -- Thomas starts chatting about the technology specifics...
• 11:20 -- lots of good specifics... hard to keep up...

Stopped when the Real re-install crashed my browser... still getting streaming errors from Akamai. No video... how disappointing. So much for my live-blogging experiment. Maybe next time!