Oracle buys its way into middleware market

Other companies may have been acquisitive, but Oracle has been the most aggressive of all in recent years, with its PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions, and the purchase of BEA. The latter helped to strongly cement its middleware strategy.

BEA was a good fit for Oracle because it was at or near the head of the middleware market. Before the BEA acquisition, a lot of Oracle's middleware portfolio was home-grown (as SAP's was). Oracle had already ticked most of the middleware boxes with its own technology, but much of it was mediocre, Neil Ward-Dutton says. It rolled out its own Java application server, for example. "But that was historically seen as a poor product," says Neil Ward-Dutton. "It engineered it along the way, but there was not a lot of market penetration, and it had an image issue."

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