Oracle Ready To Spend Billions On M&A

It's no wonder that Oracle Corp. (ORCL) is a top candidate for our Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers, or MACD, award in the information technology industry. Speaking at an annual conference, OpenWorld, Oracle president Charles Phillips suggested that over the next five years, the level of acquisition activity could be similar to what Oracle has accomplished in the past 44 months, ManagingAutomation.com reported.

As we mentioned on MACD, among a slew of deals, Oracle has managed to complete three huge deals in the past four years: They spent $5.6 billion on Seibel Systems Inc. in 2005, $3.3 billion on Hyperion Solutions Corp. in 20007 and $8.35 billion on BEA Systems Inc. in January.

The MA article quoted Phillips as saying: "We have access to innovation around the world because of our balance sheet and acquisition strategy." In a sense, he said, Oracle "is the IPO market for the software industry." Oracle builds on its enterprise software solution which includes databases (where its an industry behemoth), middleware and applications.

A 2007 ranking placed Oracle as the No. 3 software company in the world based on revenue. It was behind Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and IBM Corp. (IBM) IBM made the cut on our list of candidates for MACD in IT, but Microsoft didn't.
-- Baz Hiralal

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Comments

[Joey:]

Good thing the CEO paid himself $83.6 million dollars. The stock is down more than -(20%) in one year. I hope all the stock holders reject the entire board at Oracle.

2008 Sep 29 07:25 PM