Oracle makes its move to acquire BEA

Someone had to pull the trigger, and few companies could better leverage and extend the value of BEA than now-public suitor Oracle. On Friday Oracle announced a bid of $17 per share in cash for BEA, a 25 percent premium over BEA's closing stock price on Thursday, or $6.6 billion, according to Reuters.

Speculation has swirled for years that BEA was going to have a tougher time remaining independent. But the circling buzzard moves by activist investor Carl Icahn put the pressure on those interested in BEA to move before Icahn managed to jack the price up -- or force something akin to a breakup, based on his growing clout in BEA as a large investor.

Based on its financial and market performance lately, Oracle is firing on all cylinders. The aggressive software giant has never been stronger, its finances flusher, nor its portfolio of offerings more broad and deep.

Oracle has quite successfully acquired, absorbed and leveraged large and complex acquisitions including Seibel, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Hyperion. Oracle should be very well positioned to merge BEA into the Redwood Shores, Calif. fold to fill out its infrastructure portfolio and -- crucially -- add SOA strengths to undergird its burgeoning applications business, while further exploiting the role and market depth of its extensive database installed base.

What's more, a combined Oracle and BEA offers a strategic bludgeon to all three of Oracle's main competitors -- IBM, SAP and Microsoft. At the same time, the Oracle and BEA mashup gives longtime rumored potential BEA acquirer HP a fascinating new partner for a greater depth of reach of IT solutions. Strategically aligned Oracle and HP helps reach parity with IBM, while besting SAP and Microsoft for strategic accounts penetration and retention.

HP can offer the channel, hardware, services, and client-side PC business that will complement both its strong existing partner Microsoft, and a BEA beefed-up Oracle -- a mighty powerful global enterprise market solutions alternative to IBM. Neither Microsoft nor SAP can ditch HP, even as it perhaps gets more cozy with Oracle/BEA. HP can be both neutral enough and aligned enough to play many would-be competitors as partners through the mutual need to provide a full solutions hedge to IBM.

And should Oracle succeed in acquiring and effectively absorbing BEA, the tectonic market shift may well push SAP into IBM's arms. Yet even a deeper IBM-SAP alliance could only go so far, as IBM will continue to leap up the SOA value ladder to provide more applications services as composited and increasingly verticalized business processes.

Thus the biggest loser in the Oracle-BEA conglomeration is SAP. The second big loser is Microsoft, which will be further isolated in its lack of an effective open source strategy, and boxed-in position trying to be Windows Everywhere in a loosely coupled world.

While I blogged just last week that Microsoft should buy BEA, the BEA-Oracle match up makes deep and abiding sense. I still think Microsoft needs to bite the bullet and expand its enterprise solutions purview across more platforms and frameworks while it pursues its gaming, search, consumer and mobile opportunities.

Other vendors will be significantly impacted by the proposed merger as well. Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and TIBCO will face a tougher market. That's because Oracle will provide Linux and other open source value benefits (to blunt Red Hat's differentiation), provide deeper proprietary transactional performance characteristics (to etch away at TIBCO's differentiation), and offer one-stop shopping for a full and robust Java environment (to further demean Sun's purported Java advantages).

Sun -- a one-time Oracle collaborator wannabe -- looks especially disenfranchised in an IBM-Microsoft-Oracle/BEA world. Perhaps TIBCO and Sun may need to work together? One also has to wonder whether Apple and Oracle have more room to grow in terms of cooperation and complementary enterprise solutions.

The only thing that could upset the union is if other suitors enter the fray to try and wrest away BEA from Oracle. Icahn's influence will probably assure that BEA accepts, or at least doesn't doom, the Oracle acquisition. For those today mulling a potential counter-offer to Oracle, they must surely recall the tenacity and sure-footed way in which Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. Once Oracle has its teeth into a target, little seems likely to deter it from its intentions.

Indeed, the Oracle bid for BEA will be hard to undo. Once the merger is done, this combo shifts the landscape of enterprise IT solutions providers and provides a major new global second-source to IBM's resurgent clout, while elevating the fulcrum role of HP and potentially significantly weakening SAP and Microsoft in the long run.

Sun needs an answer to iPhone ASAP, lest Java wither on the vine

Why isn't Sun giving away iPhones at customer schmoozes? They need their own Java complement ASAP, that's why.

A lot of times when you go to a Sun Microsystems schmooze event, they larder the request for your attendance with the chance to win an iPod-this or an iPod-that.

I actually got a Shuffle once just after they came out, and got to sit next to Tim Bray for dinner, too. I must have drank too much because I don't recall him saying anything interesting (or any of the other speakers, for that matter), but I sure remember that Shuffle. [Disclosure: Sun took me to a U2 concert in Boston once too, and that was awesome; thanks again.]

Yet, as far as I know, there are no free iPhones, or drawings for said hot new Apple wireless converged device, at any Sun events these days. And that's because Sun was betting part of the farm on the mobile-Java-this and the mobile-Java-that that would collectively need the next big friggin', honkin' mobile-Web-tone switch utility grid to become the best dar tootin' ringtone repository and server on Earth.

Problem is, even as tiny and robust mobile Java runtimes sit eagerly awaiting some killer apps (or widgets) on billions and billions and billions of mobile devices across the global (and no doubt orbiting Mars, too), it isn't Sun's mobile day in the clover quite yet.

Apple has made Java on the client less relevant, and OS X and Safari far more interesting. We await the iPhone third-party party any day.

And so, based on the world as it is, as a mobile developer, are you going to target Java generally or iPhones specifically? It's not a trivial question. Apple could shoot for the moon and get there. And where would that leave Java? Given the complexity that mobile Java has yet to simplify, I'm thinking the iPhone could be a big, friggin' threat here.

As I've said, creating mobile applications remains way too hard. Sun hasn't done nearly enough -- despite all the Java-this and the Java-that on all those phones and PDAs -- to make "write-once, run-anywhere" anything remotely relevant to mobile. Mobile Linux probably makes more sense to more embedded-minded folks when it comes to simplicity. I rest my case.

But, just like Ross Perot, I hear a big sucking sound -- and it is brains and resources being yanked away from Sun's NetBeans extravagance these past few years and on over to the next big mobile thing that Sun's must make work.

Yep, I hear that the brain trust at Sun around NetBeans is being tasked now with coming up with an iPhone platform killer ASAP, something to make Java more fun that a recharged manner mode LG in your front pocket. So call me.

Let me make a few guesses on the Sun Java iPhone killer platform: It will be open source, but not GPL v2, nor v3, nor CDDL; nor will it come with a Microsoft compatibility (and no-sue clause) certificate. A new license is being worked up, the MDDL (Many Developers De-lovely License). It will neither make neither the open source nor the propriety developer corps happy, and may even alienate them both. Perfect.

The Sun Java iPhone killer platform will make the case that Solaris on the mobile device is the right choice, either on x86 or UltraSparc (but you'd be silly not to use the UltraSparc, you cheapo you). Storage will cost extra, but you get a really good deal on the tape backup accoutrement to the Solaris mobile device. A free bedside dock for the tape backup will be available if you buy the stuff online. It runs cooler than Intel, too.

And the iPhone Java killer will also come with its own tools. Yep, they should be out in Q4 '08, and Swing support is assured.

Akamai counters commoditization fears by extending WAN acceleration to business, communications applications

Akamai's announcement this week of much broader acceleration benefits -- to all IP applications, including VOIP -- extends its WAN optimization capabilities into enterprises and out to remote users. The move comes as Akamai is facing perceptions its services are increasingly commodities, and therefore under downward price pressure.

The Akamai IP Application Accelerator service takes Akamai's traditional Web and electronic software distribution benefits to a wider set of applications. Now, client/server, chat, FTP file transfers, and productivity applications that use secure sockets layer (SSL), Internet protocol security (IPsec), user datagram protocol (UDP), and Citrix independent computing architecture (ICA) can gain performance boosts over the public Internet or virtual private networks (VPNs).

By making the offering a managed service, Akamai is seeking to make it simple and affordable for IT providers in enterprises and SMBs to employ WAN optimization amid a growing array of options. [Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts that I produce and moderate.]

Several mega trends are at work in the market for the extended delivery of enterprise applications and communications services. On one hand, enterprises and service providers of all stripes are seeking to cut total costs by consolidating their datacenters, modernizing their applications and streamlining the platforms they must support. They are leveraging open source options, virtualization, and low-cost hardware and storage options.

On the other hand, adoption of outsourcing, software as a service (SaaS), shared services, SOA, Citrix/terminal services, and more reliance on Internet-based communications like VOIP are making the reliance on fast end-to-end Internet performance more critical than ever. The result is a consolidation on the serving end of the equation, with more need for overall WAN performance, among more end-points that are increasingly farther away from their hosts for critical online applications and services. In other words, enterprises want many types of IP services delivered fast and secure with fewer server locations to more and further-flung users.

What's more, as more subscription-payment based services are added to the mix, the sensitivity to price for total delivery of applications is high. Those seeking WAN optimization services are seeking both high performance and low total costs.

Into this brewing storm, Akamai is taking its globally distributed network and Web-based acceleration services to a new level. In addition to providing market-dominant positions for the delivery of data and software packages and patches, as well as object and streaming acceleration for media, entertainment and ecommerce providers, Akamai is asserting itself between end users and the services they need -- regardless or the origins.

The IP Application Accelerator boosts the speed and quality of e-mail, voice over IP services, and file transfers within an organization. Akamai is also expected to begin offering more services soon that target chatty applications, RIAs, and business process services delivery directly to corporate remote branches. By combing Akamai's ability to cache data from applications closer to remote end users, while also speeding the chatty nature and interface deltas of online applications, a powerful acceleration solution is in the works that aligns well with SOA and increased use of SaaS and enterprise-managed shared services, regardless of the end-points.

A number of architectural and technical approaches can be brought to the mix of problems behind fast and dependable applications and services delivery via the Internet. For example, just as Akamai places its server boxes are ISP locations worldwide -- so that data, objects and content are closer to the browsers that call on them -- Akamai could also place such boxes inside of enterprises and at retail outlets or entertainment venues. More point to point architectural approaches that leverage strategic placement of appliances can also be leveraged.

[UPDATE: For example, a recent new offering by Starbucks and Apple that allows iPhone users who enter a Starbucks outlet to see the music selection played over their iTunes interface -- for possibly buying -- uses Akamai appliance "boxes" at each retail outlet.]

This novel approach combines a local WiFi network with iTunes and the server at each Starbucks outlet, as well as the WAN services, in such a way that innovative entertainment and mobile ecommerce services are now in the offing. I can see in the not distant future where those consumers attending a concert, movie, theater or opera could be given the choice of buying a song, video or the entire live performance itself via their converged mobile device and shopping application via an optimized network. See a show, enjoy it, buy it to keep on the que out to the parking lot. There could be sporting event innovation here too.

Such additional services that help sellers join and innovate with buyers via the mobile and Internet networks is what Akamai is banking on to elevate its value from perceived bit pipe accelerator to commerce and entertainment value-added partner. The same types of services when brought to the enterprise could allow workers to buy and use business services on an as-needed basis -- or, to gain free or low-cost applications and services when paired with relevant and useful advertising or trial services.

The announcement of Akamai's IP acceleration services for enterprises appears only the beginning of a new set of offerings and a wider strategic role for Akamai, and other WAN services providers, over the next several years.

[Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts that I produce and moderate.]

I've said it before: Microsoft should buy BEA

The dark clouds over BEA are deepening with news that activist Carl Icahn is buying up tangible influence in the software vendor (probably with the idea of a sale). BEA faces lingering unknowns on its financial statements -- not to mention entrenched concerns about sales, growth and its ability to compete against Microsoft, IBM and myriad open source alternatives.

The Icahn news bodes badly for a healthy, wealthy and independent BEA. Whether through an outright sale or false-value run-up of BEA's value and then abandonment at a false peak (remember Time Warner and Motorola), the status quo won't hold.

A few years ago when BEA was at another crossroads (like, most of the technical management tier walked out), I suggested that Microsoft should buy them. It was a novel declaration, and some snickered. Others found surprising logic in the argument but for the Microsoft religion thing around Windows Everywhere.

I think the idea of a Microsoft-BEA mashup deserves merit more now than ever. And it has more to do with Microsoft than BEA, largely because Microsoft has changed with the times in the past several years while BEA has mostly stayed the course, just renaming theirs a SOA value while voraciously resisting the middleware moniker while selling predominantly ... middleware.

As we see Microsoft truly surrounded by vipers -- despite its huge strength, influence and tenacious installed base -- it recognizes that the effects of open source on software economics is not going away. Nor is IBM. And it also knows that advertising revenue -- even at the clip that Google assembles and attracts it -- will not make Microsoft live as well as it has the past 10 years for the next 10 years.

Microsoft is not in any where near the trouble that BEA is, but BEA's history may be worth studying -- for it could be a fast-forward version of Microsoft's.

Windows Everywhere used to make great sense (and cents), but the key to remaining an IT supplier growth engine for the global 2000 enterprises and legions of SMBs is not, alas, Windows Everywhere. IT departments everywhere have a different goal than to make Microsoft their Daddy. They need to continuously cut costs while providing better services, more interoperability, and to elevate agility to the level of malleable business processes. The divergence between Microsoft's business goals and the goals of its core customers is wide and growing.

IBM gets this. HP gets this. Oracle gets this. The global SIs get this. Microsoft could get it -- and perhaps solve it substantially -- if it bought BEA now and became a true enterprise IT solutions provider; if it took the best tools and a great framework and made them the overlay to developing and managing the best combination of mainstream IT architectures, platforms and frameworks.

What's happened in the past five years is that the development, ISV, and hosting communities have divvied up into separate camps around .NET and Java. Many need to try and play nice together, but it's not been easy. It's expensive. And not only is it technology that separates these camps -- they think differently. They see the role and use of open source much differently, and they view costs of IT differently, as in where should the costs be? An astute observer mentioned to me yesterday that .NET developers are from Venus and Java framework developers are from Mars. And so it goes.

But with a deep shift on the part of Microsoft toward really embracing and extending the Java side of the universe, then we're talking about dominating not just the .NET world, but perhaps the Java one, too. Even better, how about becoming the best way to leverage the mainframe, client/server, Web and SOA paradigms? How about building on that leverage with the best management, modeling, and integration for the best price? And you could bring the advertising, media, and consumer reach into the mix. Microsoft could become a one-stop shop, rather than a proponent of a re-hashed one-shop sop about Windows Everywhere.

The strategic risks are now such that an embrace of open source and Java-centric computing by Microsoft is at par with trying to foist Windows Everywhere on everyone (while eroding the boundaries slowly over time). Cut bait, I say, and fish anew -- and to hell with an instance on one rod over another.

We're really talking about cutting total costs and complexity, not purporting to cut them both while ignoring a major portion of the real world (and letting CIOs deal with it). BEA would allow Microsoft to redefine the distinct orbits of the .NET world and the distributed Java/open source tools world. The abstraction on where to seek lock-in nowadays is at the inflection point of RIAs, SOA and ALL the legacy.

A Microsoft-BEA combination would signal true neutrality as to underlying platform requirements -- while making the new differentiation point all about total management of IT costs and complexity. This is the value that IT buyers need in a partner, not just a vendor.

Analysts debate role of governance and 'total management' in the dawning era of SOA

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: Tidal Software.

I recently had the pleasure of participating in a live discussion (now a podcast) at the Harvard Club of Boston with Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at analyst firm ZapThink, on the current state and future outlook for governance and management in SOA environments.

Moderating the discussion was Martin Milani, chief technology officer at Tidal Software, which sponsored the luncheon event. We had dozens of enterprise IT executives from the Boston area in attendance, and they joined us in a questions and answer session after the presentations.

During the hour-long "debate" Jason and I explored how IT management will evolve in the world of service-based applications. The discussion delved into issues of new standards, how SOA demands that performance management and change management should augment and elevate the role of systems management, and on how the integrity of services delivery requires a deep and wide approach to "management in total" across a service's lifecycle.

A recent survey supports some of our conclusions: That more needs to be done to provide governance and management, and that the very definition of "management" requires re-evaluation in the era of SOA.

Here are some excerpts from the event:

The key thing to keep in mind about SOA in this context is that services are an abstraction. That is, they help to provide flexibility to the business, but they don’t actually simplify the underlying technology. Many architects are a bit surprised by this, that SOA doesn't make their jobs easier or make the job of IT any easier. If anything, it’s more complex.

There's more of a challenge for IT to meet the business requirements for flexible, agile, composable, and loosely coupled services. As a result, you have this need for the IT organization to rise to the challenge of services. This is especially true in the management area because the services essentially have to behave as advertised.

The implications for those dealing with applications is that you are going to service-enable those applications, decouple, and decompose them into essential core services, and then repurpose them by cross-compositing processes. What is that going to do to you, if you think you are going to go to firefighting mode when you have performance issues? It’s simply not going to work.

You need to rethink management and support, and you need to try to get proactive in how systems will be supported to head off performance issues and create insurance policies against blackouts, brownouts or other snafus. SOA is really a catalyst toward a different approach to the management and support of the services.

[SOA management] needs to be looked at not just as management of discrete parts, not just trees within the forest that each stand on their own -- but the forest itself. I'd like to see that get to the point where it becomes something that can be assimilated further than just the systems -- with the business objectives as well.

... You are going to want to tune how your applications and services are delivered, perhaps to live up to service level agreements, or perhaps so that you can give priority to certain data, application, or services streams over others. ... That’s going to require a different level of management. It’s really about leveraging the old, finding ways to assimilate and then put a more operator- or policy-driven -- perhaps even automated -- approach on top of it.

With SOA you need to gather information about your systems both deeply and broadly: deep and wide. You can already get a fire-hose of data from your systems, log files, and agent- and agentless-based approaches already on the market. You get a ton of data. It’s working with that data in the context of a horizontal business process that’s the hard part. ... If one aspect of a process goes down, that’s the weak link in that chain, the whole chain could be at disadvantage.

In the past, you might have one application down, but people could go off and do another task, because that mainframe would be back up at two o’clock. If your entire supply chain is disabled for a period of time, that’s a higher price to be paid. So, we're looking at a different level, and I don’t think we’ve seen the solution yet.

The value of IT here can be much greater. It can be an enabler, not a cost center. It can be the way in which not only is information relayed about what’s going on, but can determine what we want to happen. We want to change that supply chain. We want to change that distribution, recall these products, get a list of every single product and every serial number, and we want to relay that to our sales force.

That sounds straightforward, but if you try to do that with a lot of IT systems today, you’re going to find yourself up there with the equivalent of mimeograph and crayons, doing it by hand -- and that’s just not acceptable. So in the future, a company’s very existence could be at stake if they don’t have agility in these processes.

SOA is really not optional. Companies that don’t get this right will suffer the consequences. They will suffer lawsuits and suffer a competitive disadvantage. They are going to go out of business. This is an important thing to keep in mind. IT is not playing around here. You can't say, "Maybe we will do SOA, if we can figure it out, or maybe we won’t. We’ll just do things the old way, where we are siloed and we keep on going."

Instead of just running around and not being able to use technology, we want to have a governance plan in place, saying “This is how we’re dealing with problems. Here is how the technology will rise to these challenges." And, we make it a matter of policy. So now, instead of just having to wing it when you have some sort of issue, there is an infrastructure in place for helping you deal with issues as they come about.

A key to this is the management challenge. As management technology improves, it is less and less about just monitoring stuff, and more and more about being able to deal with issues as a matter of policy, where your policy is in place for dealing with problems that you can’t predict -- and those are the most challenging ones. That’s what we see happening over time.

What’s happening in the management standards world is a pissing match between the big vendors. You have the Java guys wanting to this and then Microsoft guys wanting to do that, and nobody listens to them, because they can't agree with each other. So, they'll realize, "Hey, all of our customers are ignoring us. We'd better get our act together." It’s become this big political thing that’s just slowing whole thing down.

From the enterprise perspective, you don’t have to wait around for the vendors to grow up. You can get stuff done today. This isn’t going to stop you from being successful with SOA initiatives today. It might mean that two products you buy off the shelf might not interoperate as well you like. That has to be part of your plan. It might mean you have to come up with your own internal standards for the time being.

As companies move closer to SOA, it forces them to grow up. It forces them to think across boundaries. In the past, complexity has forced companies to divvy up issues into small compartments, put a box around them, and assign people to that item of complexity.

But that has stifled the ability of interoperability and of addressing things holistically, of being fleet and agile. It’s made them brittle, has made them slower, and has made things expensive. SOA forces companies to start binding what happens in pre-production to post-production, what happens in an application with what happens in an infrastructure, and what happens on a service level from an outside provider to what happens as a shared service internally.

There are great risks if you try to do SOA without growing up, but there are super opportunities if it’s done properly. It can elevate IT as a function within the organization from being an inhibitor to the absolute enablement for new business and growth and opportunity.

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: Tidal Software.