Oracle buying BEA, good for you.

Sure, I sure think it's good for me. For us, every since we left the IBM camp almost 5 years ago, we were either doing Oracle/BEA, or Open-source. So Oracle and BEA becoming one company is just going to make things easier for us, actually making it more 'IBM' like.

While some people afraid that having one vendor controls the entire vertical is dangerous and defeats the purpose of using J2EE (or JavaEE, just can't change old habits), I think that concept (or that selling point) is dead a while ago. True, a few years ago we were all saying that big corporations like to use J2EE because in J2EE they got to choose which web server, app server, database, etc. That turns out to be a sells strategy more than anything. Think about it, if an enterprise like GE invest millions in creating an infrastructure using one set of tools, would they care if they can 'switch' to another vendor in 2-3 years? No, the fact is even if the J2EE interoperability is true, no body will care once they committed. As a result, IBM's stack of solution was selling very well, so is the Oracle/BEA combination.

As an architect, an integrator or a developer, this buyout is going to help you out. Going forward, you will have 4 options when building enterprise apps, Oracle, IBM, Open-source, or Microsoft. Less choices means quickly decision making. Good for you.