BEA ships a really nice Portal, and their dev tools are very appealing.
In business terms, I think it makes a lot of sense. They gain market share in the middleware space, and enterprise customers can start thinking about consolidating their middleware as BEA is slowly absorbed. They can also avoid the worst case scenario, which is likely an SAP buyout of BEA.
Take a look at a couple of application vendors which Oracle recently purchased, Hyperion and G-Log. Their apps have a proportionally large installed base running on BEA WebLogic. Oracle is still selling licenses for those application products, including a rebranded "OTM", Oracle Transportation Management, and is bundling Hyperion BI along with the Oracle BI EE tools they acquired when they purchased Siebel. Oracle is turning into a serious one stop shop for business software. I don't see them as Computer Associates. The products they have been acquiring are actually good products, not CA "quality", and can "snap together" better.
If you want to know the truth, this makes my life SO much easier as an applications manager. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has to deal with middleware from the likes of Oracle, BEA, IBM, and OpenSource all in the same data center, with myriad applications running on whichever middleware stack the vendor and consultants recommended at the time.
