Oracle to acquire BEA Systems

NEW YORK - Oracle Corp., the world's third-biggest software maker, agreed to buy BEA Systems Inc. for $8.5 billion in cash after a three-month fight, capitulating to the board's demands for a higher price.
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BEA investors will get $19.38 a share, 24 percent more than Tuesday's close, Oracle said yesterday. BEA, the maker of software that lets programs share information, rejected an unsolicited bid of $17 in October, and asked for $21, which Oracle called "impossibly high."

The purchase, Oracle's largest in three years, marks a victory for billionaire investor Carl Icahn and a reversal from last month, when Oracle said a friendly deal couldn't be done with the current board. Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is looking to BEA to help him maintain the pace of sales amid slowing growth in technology spending.

"It is a lot more than what they initially offered," Edward Lewis, a partner at Atlantic Equities LLP in London, said. "BEA managing to flush out a higher offer from Oracle is obviously proof that their strategy worked."

Icahn, 71, BEA's largest shareholder with about 13 percent, said yesterday he supports the bid. He had pressed the board to agree to a takeover and sued in Delaware demanding that shareholders get the right to vote on a sale.

Icahn could use a win as some of his investments perform poorly. He owns about 14.5 percent of Florida home builder WCI Communities Inc., which has fallen 89 percent in the past year.

Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., rose 61 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $21.92 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. BEA, based in San Jose, Calif., surged $2.88, or 18.5 percent, to $18.46. The Standard & Poor's 500 Information Technology index has dropped 11 percent this year on concern that companies are cutting technology budgets.

The new price is expensive, based on BEA's revenue from maintenance contracts over the past 12 months, according to Bear Stearns & Co.'s John Di Fucci, calculating the price at about 9.7 times maintenance revenue, compared with the 5 to 8 times sales Oracle typically pays.

Source: Bloomberg News

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Oracle admins ignoring patches, claim researchers

Oracle issues dozens of security patches every quarter, but that doesn't mean database administrators are implementing them.

In fact, a good two-thirds of all Oracle DBAs appear not to be installing Oracle's security patches at all, no matter how critical the vulnerabilities may be, according to survey results from Sentrigo, a Massachusetts-based vendor of database security products.

The results are "surprising, and to be candid, quite frightening," said Mike Rothman, president of consulting firm Security Incite in Atlanta.

Sentrigo polled 305 Oracle database administrators from 14 Oracle user groups between August 2007 and January 2008. The company basically asked the administrators two questions: whether they had installed the latest Oracle patches, and whether they had ever installed any of Oracle's security updates.

The results, which come even as Oracle is scheduled to release its next batch of quarterly Critical Patch Updates Tuesday, showed that 206 out of the 305 surveyed said they had never applied any Oracle CPUs. Just 31 said they had installed the most recent security update from the company. In total, only one-third said they had ever installed an Oracle CPU.

In an emailed statement, Oracle said the company "encourages organisations [to] apply Critical Patch Updates in a timely fashion to maintain their security posture."

"Critical Patch Updates for the Oracle Database are cumulative for the patch set to which they apply, making it easier for customers to keep their systems current with the latest security patch updates," the company said.

The results support what Sentrigo has been hearing anecdotally for sometime, said Slavik Markovich, chief technology officer at Sentrigo. "Some database administrators don't even monitor for Oracle's CPUs. They don't even know when the CPUs come out," he said. "Sometimes, even if their security department tells them to deploy it, they just ignore it," he said.

There are two major reasons for the trend, Markovich said. The first and most important is that most DBAs fear the consequences of installing a patch on a running database, he said.

"To apply the CPU, you need to change the binaries of the database," he said. "You change the database behaviour in some ways that may affect application performance," he said. So applying security patches to a database typically involves testing them against the applications that feed off the database, he said.

"This is a very long and very hard process to do, especially if you are in enterprises with a large number of databases and applications," he said. Applying these patches means months of labour and sometimes significant downtime, both of which most companies can't afford, he said.

Some application vendors also don't certify Oracle patches to run with their applications, Markovich said.

Another problem is that companies that want to install the most recent Oracle patches need to first ensure that they have already installed the previous patch set, Markovich said.

"The real message here is that people who are in charge of operating systems and even applications have gotten conditioned into paying attention to updating their systems fairly soon after a patch or a fix comes out," Rothman said. In contrast, many database administrators continue to drag their feet when it comes to implementing needed security fixes, he said.

Oracle was not immediately available for comment.

Author: Jaikumar Vijayan @ www.techworld.com

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Oracle confident ahead of America's Cup court ruling

US syndicate Oracle on Monday voiced confidence a New York court will back its America's Cup suit against Swiss champion Alinghi, and leave the way open for a catamaran duel to decide the next edition of the event.

Oracle filed a lawsuit in a New York court last summer accusing Alinghi of adopting rules which were unfairly weighted in the Swiss defender's favour, and in November the judge ruled in favour of the US team.

The court had been expected to finalize the ruling on January 14.

But the Golden Gate Yacht Club, which represents Oracle, said a decision was not now expected until next week.

"Justice Herman Cahn of the New York State Supreme Court today heard further arguments on the order and scheduled a hearing for January 23," it said in a statement. "GGYC expects the court will sign the order either then or shortly afterwards."

"We are very pleased with today," club spokesman Tom Ehman said in the statement. "We are confident the court's decision of November 27 will be enforced."

Alinghi has asked the court to reexamine its ruling, arguing that Oracle's original challenge should have been declared inadmissable because it contains "a major flaw in the boat certificate."

But the court is widely expected to stick by its earlier decision and set a date for a catamaran duel in October 2008 for the next race, as sought by Oracle, instead of a conventional America's Cup regatta with several challenghers.

The next edition of yachting's showpiece event was originally planned for 2009 in the Spanish Mediterranean port of Valencia but it has been indefinitely postponed because of the legal dispute.

However, if Alinghi appeals the decision and the legal wrangling continues beyond the end of January it could be too late to organise a duel before 2009, under the the archaic set of rules governing sport's oldest prize known as the Deed of Gift.

But Alinghi said it has already sent two Extreme 40 catamarans to train in Valencia, where they arrived on Monday.

"We are preparing for what could happen," a spokesman for the team said.

The America's Cup first hit the rocks in the aftermath of the hugely successful staging of the 32nd edition won by defender Alinghi against Team New Zealand in Valencia in July.

The crisis was triggered by Alinghi's naming of Spain's Desafio as the official 'Challenger of Record' and a controversial reworking of some of the rules.

Oracle said Alinghi was giving itself an unfair advantage and took their case to court.

The court ruled that Oracle should be the Challenger of Record, meaning it can help negotiate the rules for the next America's Cup.

Source: www.turkishpress.com

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