Database giant Oracle suffered a knock back last week when it tried to acquire service oriented architecture vendor BEA systems for $6.6bn. The attempted acquisition would have further cemented the firm's position as a provider of enterprise-class solutions.

Announcing the bid, Oracle president Charles Phillips said, "Both Oracle and BEA customers will benefit from this increase in engineering investment as they migrate to modern SOA technologies." However, BEA's business planning and development vice president, William Klein shot an open letter back to Oracle, saying, BEA is, "worth substantially more… than the price indicated in your letter."

Should the acquisition go ahead, it would have many benefits for enterprise IT buyers, according to business and IT analyst firm Quocirca's Clive Longbottom, who commented that if the acquisition succeeded, it would give IT managers more clout when negotiating deals with competing platforms, such as IBM's WebSphere.

Bart Narter, senior analyst at US-based Celent was equally upbeat, saying that such a deal would give Oracle much better standing in the SOA market, “It’s a good move for Oracle, because although they have the Fusion platform, I don’t see much sign of it in the market place now."

Narter also pointed out that BEA would have been a better partner for SAP than Business Objects since, “BEA implementations permeate more of the organisation than business intelligence systems. SOA is the way a lot of firms are modernising their IT infrastructures, and Fusion isn’t it.”

Charles Phillips responded to Klein's letter explaining that Oracle would like the purchase to go ahead as smoothly as possible, "We are available to proceed immediately with a process that would lead to a friendly transaction. In the meantime, we remain committed to our proposed price of $17.00 per share", he wrote.