Oracle banks on BEA's strengths in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Enterprise software firm Oracle today expressed hope that BEA’s strengths in China and India will complement its growth in these two markets.

Oracle had on April 29 this year, completed the acquisition of BEA for $6.7 billion. Oracle is seeing an "exceptional strategic fit between Oracle and BEA in terms of complementary product strengths, geographic strengths, industry strengths and support for standards."

Addressing a press conference here, Amit Zaveri, vice-president, Product Management at Oracle Fusion Middleware, said his company is currently integrating BEA’s Development Centres in India to its own.

"Our engineers have already started to work together. Oracle has retained all BEA Development Centres," he said, adding no jobs were cut as a result of the acquisition.

Oracle said it has a strategic focus on middleware.

"Given Oracle and BEA’s common principles of using industry standards to provide service-oriented applications to customers, customers will only benefit from this integration."

With this integration, Oracle has become the market leader in the application deployment software market in India with 35.3 percent market share, based on total software revenue for 2007, according to research firm IDC.

With an eye on the larger pie on the Asia Pacific market excluding Japan, California, US-based Oracle said it would invest more on its R&D activities, and on the partner side to train key system integrators, including those in India.

Oracle said it will expand its partner ecosystem to include BEA’s ISV community.

"We will continue to focus on our key industries including Government Education and Health, Financial Services Industry, Manufacturing and Communication Media Utilities," Zaveri added.

The firm reiterated that it will provide support for BEA customers. "We will give minimum nine years support to BEA customers, more than what BEA had offered," Zaveri said, adding that there won’t be any forced migration to Oracle products.