It's been a busy week for Oracle and BEA, since news got out that Oracle had made an offer to buy BEA. Despite falling license sales BEA decided to reject the offer as too low, but among BEA's largest shareholders now is Carl Icahn, a billionaire investor pushing BEA hard to sell and now hoping for a bidding war (though it remains unclear that other plausible suitors would join).

Oracle has already announced that they would continue supporting BEA products after any 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)

These products substantially overlap each other. I've previously written about Oracle Portal woes and Oracle's ongoing portal switch, and this would further complicate the matter. Meanwhile, BEA's two portal products remain worlds apart in all but the company's marketing literature. Support for existing customers of all four products surely represents a wise business decision for Oracle, but to continue significant engineering investments in all of them seems quite unlikely in the long run.

If there is a silver lining at all, it is that prudent Oracle and BEA portal software customers have already been planning for potential dislocation going forward, given the transitions underway in both companies' portal product sets even before Oracle's offer. While we all wait for the next step in the acquisition drama, it seems worth revisiting those plans again.