"BEA Acquisition Will Lend Momentum To R&D"

In a quick chat with Biztech 2.0, Amit Zavery, vice president, Product Management, Server Technologies Division, Oracle, discusses the BEA acquisition and Oracle product integration strategies.

How does BEA fit into the Oracle middleware strategy?

BEA provides middleware expertise and it is one of the leading players in the middleware space. It expands our portfolio. This acquisition gives us a chance to expand our presence in strategic markets like China and India. It also allows us to expand our partner ecosystem. It brings a host of SI, channel partners, ISV communities, who are big BEA shops into our community domain. It adds lots of strengths and middleware expertise to the Oracle brand, which will help us to grow our overall business.

Can you elaborate the post acquisition integration strategy?

We are trying to make sure that product direction is very clear to both our customers and partner community. We are working very closely with BEA members in the areas of R&D and sales to come up with a cohesive and clear product strategy. We are also working towards effective integration with our partners. As a part of this, training is being provided to all BEA partners where they are updated about new products and the integration with Oracle. We are approaching our own customer base along with that of BEA to inform people about our product strategies. Our key focus is to provide continuity for our business partners and customers so that they don’t have to worry about their investments and they don’t have to go in for a forced migration.

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BEA is a leader in the Information-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment. How far will this acquisition help to drive the adoption of IaaS?

Both BEA and Oracle have been investing a lot of time and resources in this segment. We do provide lot of ways to use IaaS. The BEA product portfolio is quite strong in this area and now we are integrating their products with our fusion middleware stack and offering a cohesive unit, which will allow us to quickly grow in the global arena.

What impact do you think the combined entity will have on the enterprise software market?

The combination of Oracle and BEA does change the landscape. We already enjoy a lead in the middleware space and this acquisition will now help us to further strengthen our product portfolio. This will also allow our market presence to expand and to have the level of scale we are looking for. The acquisition will also allow us to invest in R&D, which will again help us to improve our products in the long term. The competition may face difficulty in maintaining the same pace of innovation. We have 4,500 engineers on the R&D side, which will help us to grow rapidly.

Which are the additional verticals Oracle plans to target through the new BEA product portfolio?

We already have a presence in the financial and public sectors and BEA is quite strong in the telecom sector. The combination will allow us to expand into other segments. We see tremendous scope in both the retail and manufacturing space.

What are the processes Oracle is following for product integration?

We have looked at multiple things before taking a decision to integrate products. One is the architecture, like what architecture makes sense for the customers. The second thing we looked at is how big is the install base and the third thing we looked at is the roadmap of the product in terms of functionality and completeness. Our product integration process is clearly defined and we have made this by keeping in mind the solid architecture, open standard and additional install based features of various products.

How far will this acquisition help Indian customers?

We are bringing lots of strong products from BEA to India. For example, Weblogic, which is already a leading application server, becomes the strategic application server from Oracle. All our customers can get the benefits of access to scalable high performance servers. We are also getting lots of business process management solutions in place. Lots of Indian customers, who are trying to adopt mainframe solutions, will now be able to do so easily. We are integrating Tuxedo with our rack. Customers can take the benefits of integrated products to have a wider application in place. We will support existing BEA customers also. They can get the benefits of Oracle offerings like JD Edward and Siebel. Lots of cross product integration is in the pipeline, which can benefit both customer bases.