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EC: Oracle-BEA gets the go-ahead
Acquisition approved…

By Tom Espiner

Published: Thursday 01 May 2008

The European Commission has approved the acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle.

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The Commission has said it approved the acquisition under EU law. The Commission said in a statement: "The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of the US company BEA Systems, an independent provider of middleware software, by Oracle, also of the US. The Commission concluded that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it."

The Commission looked at potential effects on the European middleware market, focusing specifically on application servers, portals, enterprise service bus software and applications-integration software, and concluded it had no competition concerns due to the presence of other major middleware players in the market.

The Commission statement said: "The combined Oracle and BEA entity would face several strong competitors in the overall middleware market and in each of the sub-segments, such as IBM, Sun, Microsoft and SAP, and customers would, therefore, find sufficient alternative suppliers."

The acquisition of BEA by Oracle, announced in January, followed friction between the two companies over the purchase price. In November last year, Oracle said that it was going to reduce its initial offer of $17 per share, claiming BEA was no longer worth that price. However, Oracle eventually agreed to pay $19.38 per share for BEA.