Oracle Buys BEA For $8.5 Billion

BEA, the maker of enterprise infrastructure software, has finally tied the knot with Oracle. Last October, Oracle had offered $17 per share, but BEA had said the offer undervalued BEA.

Now, Oracle will pay $19.375 per share, valuing the deal at nearly $8.5 billion.

Thanks to the deal, Oracle gets BEA’s WebLogic software into its Fusion middleware strategy–both have been competing in the middleware space. “The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle’s Fusion middleware software suite,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle Fusion middleware has an open ‘hot-pluggable’ architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA’s WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite.”

BEA software helps customers reduce IT complexity and successfully deploy Service-Oriented Architectures to improve business agility and efficiency. However, in recent years BEA has been squeezed by traditional rivals like Oracle and IBM, besides emerging threats like open source software.

Oracle has already spent more than $25 billion during the past three years buying a long list of smaller competitors like PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and Hyperion Solutions.