Forbes:

"In an attempt to offset the flattening growth of its flagship database, Oracle is building a third leg to its business, called application servers–a booming market projected to grow more than tenfold to $26 billion by 2005."

I speculated earlier this year that a big player might want to buy BEA. Their market cap was at the time at about $9B, these days it’s between $3B and $5B, so that’s getting closer to a sum Oracle can afford. I doubt the app server business market will grow that much though. Application servers are just doing a job that belongs to the operating system (in my former Microsoftie evil way of seeing things of course).