San Jose software manufacturer BEA Systems on Thursday set its own buyout price at $21 per share, or $8.2 billion, inviting offers at a stiff premium to the bid it recently rejected from Oracle Corp.

BEA set the stage for a bidding war among Oracle and other suitors by authorizing its financial advisor, Goldman Sachs, to start negotiating with “third parties including Oracle.”

“We continue to believe that Oracle’s unsolicited proposal to acquire BEA at $17 per share significantly undervalues BEA,” the company’s board of directors said in a statement.

BEA makes middleware - computer products that meld the operations of software with databases. The company’s largest shareholder, activist investor Carl Icahn, has pressed for a sale, but at a higher price than the $6.7 billion tendered by Oracle.

BEA’s own estimation of its worth is 23 percent more than Oracle’s buyout offer, but investors weren’t so sure of that on Thursday: In intraday trading, BEA shares gained 12 cents to $17.67 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Redwood City’s Oracle, a major supplier of business management and database software, has gobbled up 35 companies for more than $31 billion in the past three years. Speculation over the other possible BEA suitors has focused on IBM and the German business software giant SAP.

E-mail Bernadette Tansey at btansey@sfchronicle.com.

THIRTY-SOMETHING Scottish women place more value on relationships with female friends than with their partners and believe that men are driven by ambition and money, according to a new study.

They also believe that women are more professional and streetwise than men and that the sisterhood cares more about society.

An exclusive online survey by Scotland on Sunday into the attitudes of Scots women in their thirties has also revealed that many believe that their careers are damaged by having children.

The survey found that 82.1% of those who took part in the survey, rated their female friends as “very important” or “quite important” in their lives, compared to just 65.3% who felt the same about their partners.

When it came to the differences between the sexes, women think more of each other than they do of men; 61.2% of them believe that “driven by ambition and money” is the phrase that best describes men, while just 42.3% of them think the same for women.

More than a third believe that “selfish” best describes men, while just a quarter think it of women.

When it comes to men, the women said the most popular trait was the ability to make them laugh, with being intelligent coming second and romance third. Being rich, at least according to the study, only came in eighth.

And when it comes to children and careers, 42.1% believed that having children had either “definitely” or ” to a certain extent” held them back in a job. However, 31.6% of the women who responded to the survey said that having children had “definitely not” held them back in either the course of their career path or in their education and study.

When it comes to the right age for when to start having children, women overwhelmingly believed that the best time for starting a family was sometime in their early thirties.

In addition, the women surveyed had mixed feelings about their looks. About 60% liked the appearance of their own faces and said they were satisfied with their hair, but just over half are unhappy about their weight and 54% said they would consider having cosmetic surgery. However, two fifths said they never dieted.

BEIJING: Central banks in China and Japan drained funds from the financial system Friday after counterparts in the United States, Australia and Europe made more cash available to lenders.

The Peoples Bank of China sold 151 billion yuan, or $20 billion, of three-year bills to siphon off excess funds that are spurring lending and investment. The Bank of Japan drained 200 billion, or $1.7 billion, and has withdrawn a net 400 billion this week.

The spread of losses on securities tied to U.S. home loans has made U.S. and European banks reluctant to lend, prompting monetary authorities to add or reduce money to keep overnight interest rates to their targets. China, by contrast, on Thursday increased the amount of funds banks must set aside for a seventh time this year to cool economic growth after raising interest rates four times.

“China has not been affected by the credit-market problem in the U.S.,” said Grace Ng, an economist at JPMorgan Chase in Hong Kong.

Japans market operation was intended to push up the rate for overnight call loans between banks and other financial institutions closer to its 0.5 percent target from 0.42 percent Thursday.

“Liquidity has continued to increase rapidly since the second half of last year,” Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, said Friday in an interview.

Japan is struggling to emerge from a decade of deflation, keeping interest rates at the lowest in the industrialized world to spur expansion. Chinas economy, the worlds fastest-growing, has plenty of cash from a record trade surplus, making it difficult for the government to slow growth.

Moodys Investors Service, a rating company, said this week that Asian companies will be protected from the credit-market rout because they can obtain funding from banks and local bond markets.

The European Central Bank left its key interest rate unchanged Thursday after pumping \42.25 billion, or about $58 billion, into the market as borrowing costs reached the highest in six years. The U.S. Federal Reserve added $31.25 billion to its system, the most in almost a month. Korean rate left at 5 percent

South Koreas central bank kept its key interest rate at a six-year high as policymakers gauged how the U.S. housing recession would affect the economy, Bloomberg reported from Seoul.

The Bank of Korea left the overnight call rate at 5 percent, as expected. The bank raised rates in August to curb an expansion in household debt that may fuel asset-price bubbles.