Friday’s news that Oracle is prepared to gobble up app server powerhouse BEA for a cool $6.66B could be just another enterprise software consolidation move. But as others have noted , and the BEA board’s rejection of the deal seems to signal, that price has the number of the beast all over it. Or maybe that’s just Larry Ellison’s idea of a droll joke for spooky season?

Nonetheless, commercial enterprise software consolidation is an ongoing trend, with SAP’s offer of $6.8B for Business Objects just over a week ago. Say, do you suppose Oracle’s offer price is just Larry’s way of proving he can get a better deal than SAP?

With all this high-power deal-making going on, it’s worth considering the impact enterprise open source solutions may have on enterprise software consolidation. While SAP was talking trash about enterprise open source last year, they may be changing their tune. Certainly there are plenty of projects competing with SAP’s and Oracle’s core products. Besides, Oracle and BEA have opened up — if that’s not too dangerous a term — to some open source initiatives. We’ll see what happens after the deal dust settles.

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This entry was posted by Ryck on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 10:08 am and is filed under Enterprise open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.