Oracle’s offer for BEA expired. Really?
Published October 31st, 2007 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Oracle indicated that it will let its $17 per share offer to buy BEA Systems expire without modifying it. “BEA shareholders should not assume that Oracle will renew its $17 per share offer in the future,” Oracle said in a statement. “Over time many things can change: BEA’s business might materially weaken, the stock market can fall further from its recent record highs, or Oracle may have committed its capital elsewhere.” The BEA board had previously announced that it would negotiate with a buyer for $21 a share. The board has its own internal problems, as one of its main shareholders, financial mogul Cal Icahn, is battling to have the board consider the Oracle offer. Many financial analysts were also judging that Oracle price was generous. BEA share price was around $14 before the offer.
As the financial markets are dealing with uncertainty and the US economy may enter a recession phase, Oracle move to the sideline is the best strategic option. If BEA’s board keep refusing the offer, it will face a hard battle with Icahn and uncertainty about its future that could damage sales. If another buyer steps in, he will have to pay a higher (and maybe unjustified) price. Finally, if BEA ceases resistance, Oracle will get its target without having to increase its offer, but maybe Oracle offer was only meant to create a little bit of turbulence for its competitors.
Low Software Maintenance Period?
Published October 29th, 2007 Under Methods & Tools, Numbers, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Software maintenance is an important part of the software development activity, but it is also the less discussed. As an example of its relative importance, you could just compare the space occupied by “software maintenance” and “test driven development” in Wikipedia (and I have nothing against TDD). Furthermore, software maintenance is a topic that is mostly discussed by university scholars and no practitioners. Have you ever heard of a software maintenance guru or agile software maintenance?
The main theory is that maintenance is “just” like software development on existing systems and does not need particular approaches or skill. Anyone who has spend time trying to understand an existing program or an architecture that has been twisted during some years knows that this activity is different from new projects. Read more
BEA Systems vs Oracle: the Players and the Eventual Winners
Published October 22nd, 2007 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
The offer made by Oracle to buy BEA Systems for $17.00 a share (total value $6.6 billion) is one that could change the current state of the software development market. Currently BEA Systems’ board is refusing the proposal, stating that it undervalues the company. The stock market thinks also that the price could be higher as the closing price of BEA shares last week was above $18, even is some analysts declared that Oracle proposed price was high.
What benefits could Oracle achieve with this deal? Technically, it will acquire Web server and transaction monitoring software expertise. Even if Oracle has already its own set of products competing with BEA Systems, its technical reputation is a little bit lower in this area. Financially, the acquisition could provide additional revenues, a strategy Oracle has followed these past years with PeopleSoft and other targets. In this area, Oracle seems to transform itself in a Computer Associates-like company, more driven by financial interests than technical capabilities.
Even if it is only a “mid-size” company, BEA Systems is not a small fish in the software market and there are not many companies that can afford to buy it. So what are the other players that could enter this game? Oracle main competitor, SAP, has just announced the acquisition of Business Objects and is usually looking for more business oriented targets. IBM could be interested, but then there is many products overlap between the two companies that will make integration difficult. HP could be another possible acquirer, as it is currently trying to increase the software part of its revenues. Its interest will depend on the price to pay and how its current digestion of former acquisitions like Mercury and Peregrine is progressing. Finally, Computer Associates could also jump in the process if the price is right, but this is difficult as BEA Systems has not released audited financial figures for a long time, due to stock option issues.
In the winners side of this situation, we could certainly find IBM and JBoss, as uncertainty about the future of a company is always a strong topic that buyers will consider when the look for their Web server. Losers will be BEA Systems customers, because company executives will be distracted by the battle and that a change of ownership always rise questions on the future roadmap of the products and the availability of knowledgeable people to provide some support.
There are many probabilities that the following actions of Oracle proposal will be on the financial area. It will be interesting to see if BEA Systems shareholders will resist selling their shares and if Oracle will slightly increase its price so that everybody could look satisfied at the end. Hint: Oracle rarely takes “no” for a correct answer to its bids.
Six Resources to Check On-line Your Web Site Accessibility
Published October 11th, 2007 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
Creating the interface for a Web site is not always an easy task. Besides the questions of size and colours, you have to deal with many technologies like HTML, JavaScript or CSS style sheets, without taking into account specific languages like Flash. Then you have to find a solution that will be acceptable on different browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Safari) across different versions. The resulting code is not always pretty, furthermore if for earlier versions of your Web site you used some generators and you did not bother to control the generated code.
Recommendations and check lists exist on Web site accessibility like the “Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” produced by the W3C (WWW Consortium) Version 2 is currently in the draft status. There are also various national standards that deal with accessibility.
Reading the standards or checklist and verifying that your existing code adheres to them could be a tedious task. Therefore, it is valuable to have an external and automated point of view on your Web site’s accessibility status. Here are some free on-line tools to do this. These are sometimes on-line version of commercial Web tools. There are some limitations like often working for only one page and not for the complete Web site, but they already give you a quick first diagnostic on your pages:
* Cynthia Says portal is a Web content accessibility validation solution. It is designed to identify errors in your content related to Section 508 standards and/or the WCAG guidelines.
* Erigami produces the Truwex tool to manage website compliance with Web accessibility, online privacy, and quality standards. They offer a free on-line check of your Web site.
* EvalAccess allows to automatically evaluate the accessibility of web pages using the WCAG 1.0 from the W3C. It can evaluate a complete Web site and gives a direct relationship between errors/warnings and W3C recommendations
* Functional Accessibility Evaluator of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
* HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages according to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. HERA performs a preliminary set of tests on the page and identifies any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints met, and which checkpoints need further manual verification.
* WebXACT is a free online service from Watchfire that lets you test single pages of Web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
For those who wants to have a plug-in in their browser to check accessibility, you can consider the Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer from Vision Australia. The Web Developer extension for Firefox from Chris Pederick has its usage for accessibility explained in the following post of an excellent Web site on accessibility.
Many desktop tools will also allow you to test accessibility with trial versions existing for most of the commercial tools. The W3C maintain a complete list of Web site accessibility tools. On the same Web site, you will find also documentation on how to select a tool.
New Conferences Partnerships
Published October 2nd, 2007 Under Conferences | Leave a Comment
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