Oracle goes shopping. One of the most famous database management systems has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire NetSuite, a company founded in 1998 and a pioneer in Cloud Computing. Netsuite had revenues of 741 million dollars in 2015, but reported a net loss of 124.7 million dollars.
As reported by Il Sole 24 Ore, the transaction is worth 9.3 billion dollars, or 109 dollars per share in cash. Yesterday the Californian company’s stock closed the session at 91.57 dollars, up 9.12%. Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, explained in a statement that his group and “NetSuite’s Cloud applications are complementary and will coexist forever. We intend to invest heavily in distribution and engineering”. The IT giant’s co-CEO Safra Catz added:
“We expect this acquisition to give an immediate boost to earnings in the first fiscal year after the closing of the deal, expected in 2016”.
After the announcement, Netsuite shares soared by 18%.
It should be noted that Oracle has also bought Textura, to increase its competitiveness in the Cloud market. Last 6 January, Oracle had acquired AddThis, to integrate it into Data Cloud, a “Data as a Service” offering competing with Data.com (Salesforce), Redshift (Amazon) and Dataflow (Google). Also in the Cloud space, at the end of February the company also purchased Ravello Systems for 500 million dollars. Ravello Systems is an Israeli infrastructure as a service (IaaS) company, founded in 2011, specialising in nested virtualisation, Cloud and virtualisation, for migrating even the most complex applications to the Cloud. According to some rumours, the “cloud” is so central to Oracle that Oracle Database 12c R2 could arrive first in a Cloud version and only at a later stage be released in a traditional edition. The debut could be made official at the Oracle Openworld event in the middle of next September.
