Oracle buys Bea Systems and Captovation

Oracle will buy all outstanding shares in Bea at a price of US$ 19.375 per share, amounting to a total of some US$ 8.5 billion. Since Bea has cash on hand amounting to US$ 1.3 billion, the net purchase price would be around US$ 7.2 billion, reported Oracle. The takeover of Bea should be completed by mid-2008. No financial details are available concerning the acquisition of document capture specialist Captovation, which was announced at the same time, and should be completed during February 2008.

Oracle’s reasoning for the acquisition of Bea is to access the company’s expertise in the area of Service-oriented architecture (SOA). Oracle cited the example of the future coupling of Bea’s Weblogic Java Server and Oracle’s Fusion middleware. The Captovation products for document capture and document management are of interest for Oracle’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Oracle Senior Vice President for Server Technologies, Thomas Kurian, stated that this purchase means his company is the only vendor that can provide customers with a fully integrated solution for automating back office operations.

The database specialist publishes announcements of its strategic acquisitions on a dedicated page.