Oracle (News - Alert) this morning revealed plans to buy cloud company NetSuite for $9.3 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year.
Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, emphasized the complementary nature of the two companies’ cloud applications, said they “will coexist in the marketplace forever,” and expressed Oracle’s intention to invest heavily in distribution and engineering for both products.
NetSuite’s (News - Alert) cloud-based business management software is in use by more than 30,000 organizations around the world. It’s a single solution that addresses such business requirements as accounting, e-commerce, engineering change control, finance, global consolidation, human capital management, inventory, material resource planning, payroll, production planning, purchasing, and shop floor control. (Offering an example of how its solutions are used, a blog posted to the NetSuite website earlier this month tells the story of a women’s specialty retailer that turned to NetSuite for a platform that could offer a real-time view of its customers, and provide order and item data.)
As noted in an August article titled “6 ERP System Examples Small & Medium-Sized Businesses” on Handshake, “Gartner named NetSuite one of the few pure SaaS (News - Alert) ERP system examples that it could recommend.” NetSuite brings its offerings to market in collaboration with 350 channel partners. NetSuite Chairman, CTO and founder Evan Goldberg said that the company’s cloud solutions will be able to reach more countries and industries as part of Oracle.
Oracle Cloud, meanwhile, addresses a wide range of business requirements, disciplines, and technologies. That includes cloud-based solutions for billing and revenue management, business intelligence, compute, database, customer experience, database backup, document management, enterprise resource planning, human capital management, Java, marketing, mobile, Object storage, sales, and social. And Oracle recently introduced the Accelerated Buying Experience, which enables customers to purchase Oracle Cloud services with the click of a button.
“To enable this, Oracle is using its own software-as-a-service applications, including Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, and Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote Cloud,” Oracle Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff Doug Kehring explained.