Contact: Brenon Daly
Since 2005, Oracle has notched an average of about an acquisition per month each year. Generally speaking, the deals can be sorted into three main buckets: broad horizontal technology purchases, small technology tuck-ins and equally small purchases of companies selling applications for specific industries. Fittingly for a busy buyer, Oracle has one of each of those types of transactions either done or ready to get done. At least, those are the rumors.
First, let’s start with an acquisition that Oracle has announced. On Monday, the vendor said it will pay an undisclosed amount for Relsys, a 22-year-old company that makes safety and risk management software for the pharmaceutical industry. Oracle’s purchase of the Irvine, California-based company comes after it made similar buys for software vendors that serve specific industries, including telecommunications, insurance, retail, utilities and others.
Turning to the speculative transactions, we heard a month ago from several sources that Oracle was interested in picking up Virtual Iron Software. As an example of a technology acquisition, Virtual Iron would add Xen management capabilities to Oracle, which already has a Xen-based hypervisor. And on a larger scale, the market has been buzzing with talk this week about whether Oracle might be mulling a bid for Red Hat. (The open source giant, which reports earnings after today’s close, has seen its shares double since late November.)
While Oracle has reached for open source vendors in the past (Sleepycat Software and Innobase) and still lacks an OS offering in its portfolio, we have doubts that it would make a play for Red Hat. The main reason: Larry Ellison has maintained that his company does not need to have a Linux distribution of its own since it provides support for Red Hat via its Unbreakable Linux program, which was launched in late 2006.
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase