Portal acquisitions - Will there be synergies or is it greed?

After several attempts by Oracle to acquire BEA, the two companies entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire BEA. By acquiring BEA oracle will now have four portal products and I guess that the Oracle management need to make some tough decisions – they can’t bring all products to the marked. I also question the overlapping developement and engineering efforts.

Oracle has already announced that they would continue supporting BEA products after the acquisition. The situation could become quite interesting for portal customers though, as Oracle would find itself in possession of four different portal products:

• Oracle Portal
• Oracle WebCenter
• BEA WebLogic Portal
• BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (formerly Plumtree)
  

The product lines significantly overlap and I will try to give a quick description regarding overlaps:

• BEA AquaLogic and Oracle WebCenter both focus on integration and SOA, and can offer good web application development toolkits.
• BEA WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal bring to marked strengths in role and object based portals with focus on personalization and segmentation, and can offer a platform for self-service applications
• All four portals offer only average CMS and DMS functions in comparison to other special ECM and portal vendors

Oracle aquired BEA with overlapping products, this bring Oracle into a position where they have to support 4 product lines with a oversized engineering and support team. In my oppinion Oracle should merge with a company with complementary products (WCM or ECM), this would make sense and would bring synergies.

Therefore I struggle understand Oracles acquisition strategy, and I miss to se the synergy, and as I see it – ”two plus two is still equalling...just two”.

If any se this different please bring me wisdom ☺