Oracle bidding on BEA is a good thing for BEA. Why? Only the strong firm survives. What is next, SunMicrosystems. Oracle definitely should buy SUN. Oracle 10g and 11g are already written in Java. Sun stock symbol is JAVA. All good firms should join together. As for the stockholders of Sun, they will get $$$. For J. Schwartz and S. McKealy, they can cash out. I made this point two years ago on this server asking McNealy to step down and sold his firm to Oracle.

Long live Oracle, fighting against SAP...

While it clearly looks appealing mostly for Oracle, they pretty much had to throw away large portions of their own not too succesful applications first.

On one end there is much they tried to squeeze into the database at all costs (such as a small, but decent App Server called Orion) making it almost impossible to scale both at the same time.

Then there is the tools selection, where such merger would clearly help and strenghten those at Oracle who already contribute to Eclipse, even if it is just Java Persistence or other parts of WebTools. Like IBM or (far less significant though) other vendors like SAP, too BEA was among the early adopters of the Eclipse Platform. Throwing all that away in favour of the JDeveloper IDE would be as if Larry Ellison sank his yacht for a wooden float, even if that might have grown much over the years, too.
And while both he and former Sun CEO Scott McNeally discussed an adoption of NetBeans for future releases, that is now the least plausible option. What a 'JDeveloper for Eclipse' (12, 13, or whatever they might call it?) could of course gain a lot from Oracle was if they added a strong UML tool similar to those offered by e.g. Rational/IBM or Borland. Not that I would wish those or other IDE and plugin vendors to be pushed out of the market by such a move, but having added this already users would hardly understand it not there in future versions.

I can't really say that much about HP. What BEA would of course give them is what JBoss has provided for Red Hat, even at a much smaller size so far.
Of course they may stick to the Hardware and OS supporting BEA, Oracle or a combination of both as partners.

IBM would profit little to nothing on the Tools front as they already use more or less the same bricks as BEA in the first place. And their share in both the Java EE market and Portals is clearly above those of Oracle in those 2 sectors. So while almost a monopoly there IBM would hardly gain much except keeping Oracle from growing stronger.

The logic of an Oracle/BEA deal now in 2007 isn’t much different from what it was in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005...

Stocks advanced Friday as the tech sector rebounded amid deal news, and a key data point indicated that inflation appears to be in check.

Bill Nichols, trader with Bear Stearns, credited deal action in the technology sector with giving a particular upward push to stocks in the session.

What is being said interally at BEA? Happy/sad/scared/exhilarated?