BEA rebuffs Oracle's bid for $6.7 B

Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes

BEA rebuffed Oracle's bid on Friday afternoon, claiming that $6.7 B "significantly undervalues" the company. Even though the bid was 25% over BEA's stock value. Of course in response to the expected bidding war, BEA's stock has surged to $18.82, up more than 38% in a single day.

Now it's up to Oracle to come back with a counter offer. Let the negotiations begin.

Although Alfred Chuang has indicated that he wants BEA to stay independent, I seriously doubt that the board and the BEA stockholders will be able to resist the offer.

As for counter offers?

Speculation has been focusing on SAP, HP, and IBM:

BEA doesn't really offer much to SAP. Because of mySAP's use of ABAP, the WebLogic and AquaLogic product families can't displace NetWeaver. BEA has a few nice bits that SAP could exploit: AquaLogic Data Services, AquaLogic Enterprise Security, the SIP server extension to WebLogic Server, and the Workshop tooling. But those bits certainly aren't worth >$7 B to SAP.

HP has repeated stated that it doesn't want to get back into the application runtime business. It's focused on management -- not runtime. I'd be surprised to see HP jump into the bidding war.

I think IBM has the most to gain from BEA -- if only to prevent Oracle from getting it. Oracle + BEA will be a much stronger force in the superplatform market than the two companies on their own, and the combination should be giving IBM night sweats.

Other possible counter offers?
- Microsoft (not likely)
- Dell or Intel (possibly -- if they were considering getting into the platform business)
- Red Hat (not likely)
- Novell (if only they could afford it -- but that combination would be doomed)
- Software AG (maybe, but it would be an awfully big bite -- especially so soon after webMethods)
- Tibco (maybe, but again -- it would be an awfully big bite)
- Sun (well, now there's an idea -- but I would hate to see it happen)