SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) – Oracle is seeking to stay ahead in the high-stakes race to dominate cloud services – Thursday, the company furthered its efforts with a very familiar partner.
The software giant will pay $9.3 billion in cash to acquire NetSuite, a cloud computing company co-founded by Oracle’s executive chairman and largest shareholder, Larry Ellison.
Oracle will pay $109 in cash per NetSuite share in the transaction, which is expected to close this year. The sale price represents a 19 percent premium NetSuite’s closing share price of $91.57 Wednesday. NetSuite’s board has unanimously approved the deal, the company said.
The company’s shared rallied more than 18 percent on Thursday to $108.41 after rising 9% Wednesday on speculation of a deal. Oracle shares themselves saw a rise of 0.6% to $41.19.
The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company has for some time been attempting to make a rapid, costly pivot to cloud services as large rivals including Microsoft and Amazon – along with cloud-first companies such as Salesforce.com – make aggressive plays for corporate clients with cloud-based business offerings to add to their tech stacks. While cloud servicing revenues have been rising rapidly at Oracle, the company has been unable to offset the decline in software license revenue, its biggest business, as companies shift more of their activities to Internet- or cloud-based applications.
In NetSuite, Oracle gets a company that became the first to offer offer a full suite of enterprise resource planning applications, said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research. This acquisition allows NetSuite to be developed further and will likely make it easier to integrate it into other software and platforms. You can learn how to integrate Hubspot with Netsuite here if you don’t already know but it’s thought Oracle will seriously be looking to increase NetSuite’s presence among businesses.
It’s also buying a business with close ties to the company itself – located just up the road in San Mateo, NetSuite was co-founded in 1998 by current NetSuite Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Evan Goldberg and Ellison as NetLedger, a cloud accounting company.
Ellison, who stepped down as Oracle’s chief executive two years ago, is now the company’s full-time executive chairman. He and his family remain the largest shareholders of NetSuite, owning more than 45% of outstanding shares as of March 31, 2016, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At its initial public offering in 2007, NetSuite was valued at $2.1 billion. Though it’s not profitable, its market cap had increased to $7.4 billion this year.
Current NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, who handled global marketing for Oracle from 1996 to 1998, has said he expects NetSuite to hit $1 billion in revenue for the first time.
“(Oracle and) Larry (Ellison) gets the cloud revenue he needs. NetSuite gets access to the full Oracle stack. Customers should not be aversely impacted,” Wang said.
If completed, Oracle’s purchase of NetSuite will be the largest the company has seen since its 2005 purchase of PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion.
SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) – Oracle is seeking to stay ahead in the high-stakes race to dominate cloud services – Thursday, the company furthered its efforts with a very familiar partner.
