Oracle Corporation has completed its long awaited acquisition of BEA Systems Inc after gaining approval from the European Commission. Oracle finally paid approximately $8.5 billion for BEA after a tumultuous courtship that began in October 07.

The corporation has enforced its position as the world’s largest software company overcoming the European Commission’s enquiry into potential competition issues.

The EU Commission ruled that “horizontal overlap between the parties' activities would not give rise to competition concerns, in particular since Oracle and BEA were not seen to compete head-to-head.” It also cited that BEA would “face several strong competitors in the overall middleware market and in each of the sub-segments, such as IBM, Sun, Microsoft and SAP”.

Oracle President Charles Phillips said, "The addition of BEA will accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure,"