Oracle’s $6.7 billion unsolicited bid for BEA Systems stresses that it would offer the “best home for BEA’s employees and customers.”

But after reading a transcript of the software giant’s last earnings call, it may seem hard to believe they want BEA at all.

Take this quote from Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and CEO: “In Middleware, while Oracle is not number one like we are in Database, we are by far the fastest growing Middleware company… We really separated ourself in the niche players. BEA, we’re almost twice as large as BEA right now, some falls back. BEA is shrinking in terms of new license sales.”

Oracle President Charles Phillips picks up the account later in the call: “In Middleware, you heard Larry talk about our strength there. We grew 129% compared to a decline of 9% for BEA. I guess we’ll have to stop using them. They are becoming less relevant by the day.”

BEA’s shares closed at $18.82 on Friday, however, above the $18 offer price as the market signaled its expectation that a higher bid would be forthcoming from somewhere.

While BEA shareholder Carl Icahn ran through a list of companies he thought he’d like to counterbid against Oracle, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, some analysts thought it was more likely that either Oracle would have to bump its bid or there would be a white knight.

Murray Beach, president of Boston Corporate Finance and M&A International Inc. , said IBM would make the most logical sense but they already have a lot of what BEA has.

“When this happened before with PeopleSoft, no one tried to challenge Oracle apart from PeopleSoft itself,” he said. “And in fact Oracle ended up raising the bid… It is really whether or not they (BEA) try to fight off Oracle and how hard they try to fight it off which is going to raise the (offer) price. The people who would be logical (to counterbid) already have parts of the puzzle, so why would they pay a premium for it?”

“I can imagine too many of the big guys trying to get into a fight with Oracle,” added Beach.