Oracle offers $6.7 billion to buy BEA Systems

Oracle announced on Friday that it has offered to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $17 per share in cash.

Oracle said it had written to BEA's board of directors on Tuesday to make the offer, which represents a premium of 25 percent over BEA's closing share price on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal valued the offer at $6.66 billion.

BEA was a pioneer in the market for Java application server software used to deploy and manage business applications, competing with products like IBM Corp.'s WebSphere. It has been rumored to be an acquisition target on numerous occasions but managed to retain its independence.

"This proposal is the culmination of repeated conversations with BEA's management over the last several years," Oracle President Charles Phillips said in Friday's statement. "We look forward to completing a friendly transaction as soon as possible."

BEA executives were not quoted in the statement, however, and there was no indication early Friday as to whether the company was open to being acquired. That raises the possibility of a lengthy takeover battle like the one Oracle waged to buy PeopleSoft a few years ago.

Oracle said buying BEA would help it to beef up its own middleware suite, an important area for the company that is serving to link several families of business applications that it has acquired. Oracle said it would protect the investments of BEA customers if the deal were to go ahead.

"Our continuing support commitment has been amply demonstrated with all of our previous acquisitions, including PeopleSoft and Siebel. BEA will be no different," Phillips said.

Oracle's Fusion middleware already includes many of the products BEA sells, including an application server, portal server and development tools, meaning the acquisition would create considerable overlap.

Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk, said Oracle's primary motive is likely the expansion and solidification of its presence in the middleware market.

"For all that BEA is not at the heights that it once was, it still owns solid accounts across global enterprises, and while Oracle obviously isn't lacking for presence in those accounts, BEA's middleware is often more highly regarded," O'Grady said.

BEA was an early leader in applications servers but saw its lead whittled down gradually by IBM and later by Oracle, which built up a strong middleware business itself. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison often liked to predict BEA's demise, but the company has managed to cling onto a respectable market share by developing new SOA and business process management technologies.

It has been under pressure of late, however, notably from the billionaire investor Carl Icahn, one of BEA's large shareholders. Icahn said last month that he would press for the sale of BEA, believing the business would find it hard to stay afloat as an independent company.

In August BEA reported total revenue for its second quarter of $365 million, up 7 percent from a year earlier, although revenue from new license sales, an important measure of growth for a software company, declined by 9 percent to $123 million. The company didn't report full figures for the quarter because of an ongoing investigation into its stock options grants.

BEA's shares on the Nasdaq closed at $13.62 on Thursday, down from a 52-week high of $16.77. In premarket trading Friday morning the shares had jumped 31 percent on the news of Oracle's offer, to $17.84. Oracle shares were fluctuating around their closing price Thursday of $22.46.

The deal would mark yet another big acquisition for Oracle, which is on an unprecedented buying spree that has netted it more than 30 software companies in the past three years. They include the applications vendors PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards, performance management vendor Hyperion, and database vendors TimesTen and Innobase.

Ellison has said the acquisitions are designed to win the company new customers and increase its economies of scale so that it can invest heavily to become a leader in the applications market.

The deals have catapulted Oracle into second place behind SAP in the business applications market, although analysts question how Oracle can manage so many different product lines and integrate them under one roof.

Oracle indicated earlier this year that it would ease off the blockbuster acquisitions while it integrated the other companies it has bought. However, Ellison has always seemed to covet BEA, and he may feel that the unrest caused by Icahn has given him a chance to act.

Author: James Niccolai @ IDG News Service

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A Success Year for Oracle CRM

Oracle today announced that Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand has been heralded by end users as providing unrivalled choice of application deployment scenarios and integration options for organisations of all sizes across Europe, Middle East & Africa. In the last year, Oracle expanded its relationships across the region to include leading brands such as, Amazing Global Technologies, Ambu A/S, Experian, Hôtels B&B, Netstore and SAS Cargo Group A/S.

With more than 12 years experience in delivering CRM solutions, Siebel CRM On Demand was identified by leading independent analyst firm, Forrester Research, as having a unique offering with over five crossvertical and industry specific CRM editions. In the April 2007 report “Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand is a Leader in Sales Force Automation”, Liz Herbert, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research wrote, “The vendor understands the needs of a range of industries and can provide best practice expertise in addition to prebuilt industry editions. Siebel CRM On Demand currently sells five vertical editions, which is five more than many of its SaaS CRM competitors.”

“This has been a particularly strong year for Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand, as demonstrated by the number of positive analyst reports and the growth of our customer base,” explains Loïc le Guisquet, Senior Vice President for Applications, EMEA. “One of our main differentiators is that customers can operate the Siebel CRM On Demand solution as part of a hybrid strategy that includes Siebel on-premise or other Oracle products. It provides them with a lot of flexibility, which delivers value in their business. Listening to our customers has shown us that on-premise and On Demand is not always a straight choice and that many organisations can benefit from using both solutions in different areas.”

Author: Fiona McGoldrick @ www.irishdev.com

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Oracle's Prescription for Pharma Contact Centers

Oracle connects its Siebel Contact Center application to its Oracle Adverse Event Reporting System, targeting pharmaceutical companies. Software conglomerate Oracle Corp. has added a vertical-specific solution to its contact center options for the pharmaceutical industry. The Siebel Contact Center Integration Pack (CCIP) for Oracle Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS), available now, is designed to aid the capture, reporting, and management of adverse events and product complaints, a mission-critical effort in that sector.

The CCIP is designed not only to help pharmaceutical companies streamline the handling of adverse events, but also to bolster data integrity. Oracle AERS is the company's solution for product-safety monitoring and compliance for the medical-device and pharmaceutical industries. The CCIP is the latest addition to the company's Oracle Application Integration Architecture (OAIA), a set of products that integrate proprietary, third-party, and custom applications, and leverages the Oracle Fusion Middleware services-oriented architecture (SOA) suite.

"Siebel Contact Center Integration Pack for Oracle AERS seamlessly passes customer, product complaint and potential adverse event information from Siebel Contact Center to Oracle AERS, automatically escalating reports, as appropriate," says Neil de Crescenzo, group vice president of healthcare and life sciences at Oracle. "These capabilities drive faster event processing to help pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers promptly report accurate adverse event and complaint information to the appropriate safety and regulatory [groups] for further evaluation."
The integration pack's closed-loop solution facilitates compliance and more effective management, according to de Crescenzo. "To help ensure product safety, [companies in this sector] are required by regulatory agencies to track and report potential product issues and adverse events both during clinical trials and after a product is introduced to the market," he says. "Rapid detection of events and issues is critical to safety and compliance. Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers receive [this] information...from many different channels. Without a closed-loop solution, information on potential product issues or adverse events coming into a contact center has to be collected and then re-entered into an organization's [AERS] -- a process that can be time-consuming and costly."

In addition to its benefits in helping ensure public safety and reducing compliance expenses, the CCIP automatically loads event-related information from Siebel Contact Center into Oracle AERS and updates it to reflect changes, facilitating faster and more efficient reporting, de Crescenzo says. "The solution reduces duplicate data entry and provides life sciences organizations with complete, accurate, and synchronized information, helping to reduce costly conflict resolution and reconciliation."

"Pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers are challenged to cost-effectively ensure compliance within an increasingly complex web of regulations, while working to improve overall operational efficiency and accelerate delivery of safe and effective products to market," says Eric Newmark, research manager at Health Industry Insights, an IDC company. "Automated adverse-event and product-complaint systems can facilitate faster and more efficient reporting, which, in turn, helps to ensure public safety, reduce organizational liability, and contain the cost of compliance."

Author: Coreen Bailor @ destinationCRM.com

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