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Oracle bids $6.66bn for BEA
Larry goes shopping again...

By Reuters

Published: Friday 12 October 2007

Oracle has offered to buy BEA Systems for about $6.66bn, its latest effort to up the ante against Microsoft and Germany's SAP in the fiercely competitive market for business software.

Oracle offered $17 per share in cash for BEA, which is a 25 per cent premium over BEA's closing stock price on 11 October. Shares jumped in premarket trading to match the offer price.

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

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has been pushing BEA to put itself up for sale and, by 4 October, had built a 13.22 percent stake in the company.

BEA sells application server software and middleware, which is used by software developers to establish systems on which other applications operate. Its products are used in transaction processing, billing, customer service, provisioning and securities trading.

Oracle has spent the past several years buying up other speciality software makers in an effort to compete with Microsoft and SAP.

The proposed deal is Oracle's biggest since it bought Siebel Systems for about $6bn in early 2006. Earlier this year it bought Hyperion Solutions for more than $3bn.