Oracle buys NetSuite for $9.3 billion

Oracle announced today it has agreed to purchase NetSuite, a cloud-based provider of software for running a business, including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and ecommerce.

At $109 per share in cash, the deal is valued at $9.3 billion. In a statement, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd described the two companies’ cloud applications as “complementary,” and indicated that NetSuite’s products will continue to exist as independent offerings.

Co-founded in 1998 by Oracle founder and current Executive Chairman Larry Ellison and NetSuite Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Evan Goldberg, the company was initially called NetLedger and focused on cloud-based accounting. Ellison and his family are the single largest shareholders, owning nearly half.

The San Mateo, California-based NetSuite was one of the first providers of software-as-a-service, although Oracle itself really climbed aboard the cloud only a few years ago. Over 30,000 businesses worldwide currently employ NetSuite’s cloud services to manage finances, inventory, customer data and ecommerce.

In addition to the additional revenue, the acquisition allows Oracle to complement its own enterprise-focused services with NetSuite’s orientation toward midsized companies. As Internet Retailer notes, for instance, 64 of the Top 500 retailers use Oracle’s ecommerce platform, as well as nine in the second 500. By contrast, NetSuite has only two in the 2016 Internet Retailer Top 500, but 19 in the second 500.

“While Oracle has a history of acquiring and integrating businesses over the past two decades,” B2B ecommerce portal Handshake CMO Mike Elmgreen told me via email, “[T]he process of bringing NetSuite into Oracle will likely slow down NetSuite’s pace of innovation as they sort out the overlap in products and people as a result of the acquisition.”

Last month, Oracle competitor Salesforce bought enterprise commerce platform Demandware for $2.8 billion and created a new Commerce Cloud around it.

This purchase is the latest in a string of Oracle’s cloud-focused acquisitions. It bought cloud computing firm Ravello Systems in February, cloud payments company Textura and cross-device tracker Crosswise in April and energy software provider Opower in May.