Oracle announced Tuesday it completed its US$8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems, bringing to a close a contentious buyout effort that began last spring.
Oracle — which like Microsoft went public with its unsolicited bid for a reluctant acquisition target — cleared its final merger hurdle when European antitrust regulators gave it a thumbs up.
In Oracle's case, the enterprise software applications behemoth spent more than three months applying pressure to its rival BEA, before the parties struck a deal with the help of the middleware software maker's largest individual investor, Carl Icahn.
BEA initially rejected Oracle's bid as too low, prompting Oracle to pull its bid and go quiet for a couple months as BEA's stock fell. But with the help of Icahn serving as a quasi-mediator, a deal was struck at a slightly higher premium than what Oracle initially offered.
"The addition of BEA will accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture infrastructure," Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, said in a statement. "Together, Oracle and BEA will provide a series of complementary and well-engineered middleware products, allowing customers to more easily build, deploy, and manage applications in a secure environment."
With the tech industry closing the chapter on one contentious merger effort that eventually turned "friendly," it waits to see if another will begin with Microsoft going "hostile" with its bid to acquire Yahoo. Microsoft is weighing its options this week.
