Database giant Oracle is hoping to buy smaller software portal vendor BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. The bid won’t work and BEA has already rejected Oracle, but that won’t stop the aggressive and tenacious Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and company.

Oracle has low-balled BEA with an offer of $17 a share. Today BEA is trading at well over $18 a share. Some analysts have wrongly predicted that SAP would make a bid, but SAP has publicly state it will not. Other potential suitors could include IBM and HP. HP has fanned the flames by stating, “No comment.”

This won’t deter Oracle. They’ve directed many nasty and hostile takeovers before (most recently PeopleSoft). Interestingly though, if Oracle should succeed, it will build its portal offerings stable to four portal products:

• Oracle Portal
• Oracle WebCenter
• BEA AquaLogic
• BEA WebLogic

It goes without saying that should Oracle succeed it will not maintain four Oracle products. While Oracle appeared to be putting its energy into the new Oracle WebCenter product, as of the summer, WebCenter had no intranet portal implementations that they could reference. Nor had Oracle even deployed WebCenter to manage or showcase any of their own sites.

Yesterday a BEA executive told me that if Oracle succeeds in purchasing BEA it is unlikely that Oracle would fold either AquaLogic or WebLogic portal solutions. At the same time, one of BEA’s engineers espoused the great similarities between its two portal products and said that they’re basically the same platform.

In short, Oracle is interested in BEA for more than portal solutions, but its intention to maintain its own portal products is in question at a time when BEA’s commitment to maintaining two portal products may also be wavering. Further consolidation in the portal market will continue and buyers should be cautious. 

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The Vanguard Group is one of the largest mutual fund companies in the U.S. with 12,000 employees and approximately $1.1 trillion in assets under management. Vanguard is a fairly wealthy and established company, to say the least.

Vanguard was recently honored by the annual InformationWeek 500 committee as the third best and “most innovative” company in the country. Powering this esteemed nomination was the unveiling of a new company portal with a massive $10 million price tag.  But the whopping price tag does deliver some impressive functionality as revealed by Chris Murphy in his InformationWeek article Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit):

·         Customizable and personalized home page (requires “15 minutes to customize”)

·         Federated search (powered by Autonomy) and access to the portal, Lotus Notes e-mail and databases, calendar, news feeds, and Oracle databases

·         Time-off and benefits, training and travel approvals

·         Employee workspaces (blogs and wikis to be rolled-out next year)

·         Employee directory listings show direct reports with Ajax-powered rollovers that allow the user the mouse over a listing to provide additional details and information on each person

“With no retail outlets, Vanguard's Web site is by far the largest channel for customer contact, far more than telephone and mail,” writes Chris Murphy in InformationWeek. “The company wants a site that measures up to the best of the Web, so it consciously uses its intranet as a test bed. In 2006, for example, Vanguard knew it was about a year away from wanting to use Ajax-enabled rich Internet applications for customer apps, so it experimented with them on the intranet.

Interestingly enough, like most applications and IT projects at Vanguard, much of the new portal was deployed by internal resources. Vanguard says they build about 70% of their own applications. In fact, Vanguard employs a massive IT force of 2,600 IT employees, plus approximately 300 contractors.

Vanguard says the intranet portal will save them about $10 million per year, but the business case “hinges on cutting wasted hours employees spend on tasks such as searching for information.”

That’s a pretty soft business case for a $10 million portal, but to each their own.

READ the complete article: Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit.

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: In the 80s and early 90s I was a big baseball fan. But the lockout of ’94 soured me and I’ve not been much of a fan. In fact, this year was the first year I can remember that I did not get out to a single game, nor did I ever watch a complete game on TV. But there was something about the Colorado Rockies amazing drive to the playoffs that had me tune-in to the big tiebreaker showdown between Colorado and San Diego last night… you simply don’t have to be a big baseball fan to appreciate the drama and glory of the match last night.

I’ve seen some big games and dramatic clinchers: I sat riveted and cheering the Joe Carter clinching home run for the Blue Jays in ’93; I watched Luis Gonzalez loop the winning single for the Diamondbacks in ’01; I saw Kirk Gibson deliver the big dramatics for the Tigers in ’84 and later for the Dodgers in ‘88. Last night’s Colorado-San Diego game deserves company with all of those big games. The story line, the lead-up, the play, the extra innings, the controversial conclusion… it had it all. A remarkable, remarkable night in sports history. Even if you don’t like sports, this story is worth witnessing…