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TIBCO subtly announces it’s for sale
By Michael Lundberg | October 21, 2007
In a somewhat brief statement with Reuters last Friday, TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive comments that the board would, “do what is right for shareholders” if a bid were made for the company. He further stated, “we are a very attractive franchise.” This announcement shouldn’t be surprising given that just one week prior Oracle announced before the opening bell a plan to acquire TIBCO competitor, BEA Systems. BEA System has long been rumored as a takeover target ever since Carl Icahn announced on September 14th that had amassed 33.4M shares of BEA, or 8.5% of the outstanding shares and was pushing for BEA to seek to be acquired.
If BEA is ultimately acquired by Oracle, TIBCO would be the last of the “pure-play” software players in the service oriented architecture space. The question remains, who could acquire TIBCO? IBM? SAP? HP? Only time will tell, but my bet is on either IBM or HP.
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The original Reuters article can be found here.
Topics: Business |
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
What about the guys with the Red Hats?
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm
@ Örjan - You know, I’ve never thought about RedHat, but anyone is a possibility. Have you heard anything to indicate that RedHat is looking at TIBCO? It would certainly make for an interesting turn of events.
If Oracle completes it’s proposed acquisition of BEA, I just don’t think that TIBCO could survive more than a few years in it’s current state. IBM and Oracle have much larger research and marketing dollars that, over time, would wear TIBCO down.
I’m really surprised that someone hasn’t stepped up to acquire TIBCO, especially given that the market is down and TIBCO’s stock price is further depressed. Of course, their deflated stock price could also be taken as a sign of their predicament.
They need a buyer to continue to thrive.
Thanks for the comment,
Michael Lundberg
http://www.michaellundberg.com
October 24th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Oracle or SAP is the one that would benefit most from purchasing TIBCO since both have a good integration platform but are missing a best of breed MOM. (And BEA Tux is not good enough
)
Oracle is also focusing on Telco, Retail and the Financial sector so TIBCO would be good to strenghten the FS and Telco sectors. ActiveMatrix also fits good with Oracles grid strategy (where Oracle has a bit of a gap on the MS sky.net side)
The same is also true for Red Hat and TIBCO has som good products that already are cash cows, and Spotfire would be a good fit for Red Hat.
IBM already have MQ series, BAM, BPM etc so I do not know why they would aquire TIBCO.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Now that Oracle has acquired BEA and Sun has acquired MySQL, I believe that Microsoft should acquire Tibco. This allows Microsoft to directly compete with Sun’s Java and give up on C# and to some extent with its .net. Microsoft Tibco would be their best acquisition since Visio.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:05 am
@ Dirk - I agree that Microsoft could potentially acquire TIBCO. After all, Microsoft and TIBCO recently announced a new partnership at TUCON, which I mentioned here (http://tinyurl.com/5hqt6l). However, since TIBCO’s tools are predominantly based on Java, I’m not sure that Microsoft would be the best suitor for them.
One company that I think would be a good fit is Hewlett Packard. HP was a major TUCON sponsor two years ago, and HP has already invested in Mercury Software, which got them Systinet, so it’s clear that they already see the value in SOA. If HP is going to really be a competitor to the likes of IBM, SAP, and Oracle, they’ll need to strengthen their software offering and TIBCO would seem like a good place to start.
It’s really a shame that HP didn’t make a move to acquire BEA when Oracle was looking at them, but TIBCO would also really work well for them.
Thanks for the comments!
Michael Lundberg
http://www.michaellundberg.com