Who thinks the week before Thanksgiving is a slow news week? Oracle was gracious enough to provide some big news yesterday to tech journalists who were tired of working on year-end stories: In a $28.3 billion mega deal, the database behemoth announced the acquisition of Cerner, a business that specializes in electronic health information.
“Oracle Corporation and Cerner Corporation yesterday jointly announced an agreement for Oracle to purchase Cerner through an all-cash tender offer for $95.00 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion in equity value,” according to a press announcement from the firm.
Oracle enters the healthcare vertical in a big way with this transaction, a rising market that should aid Oracle’s young cloud infrastructure company, which is still in the single digits, according to Synergy Research.
According to Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, the deal is the largest in Oracle’s history, and the business has a lengthy history of acquisitions.
“It’s a smart move by Oracle. It cements Oracle technology even deeper into healthcare, and brings a lot of current and especially future work load to Oracle Cloud. Not to mention that Oracle is buying into the largest and fastest-growing vertical industry,” Mueller told.
That growth potential certainly didn’t escape, Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “Cerner will be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come as we expand its business into many more countries throughout the world. That’s exactly the growth strategy we adopted when we bought NetSuite—except the Cerner revenue opportunity is even larger,” she said in a statement.
It’s worth noting, too, that while Catz is talking about worldwide development, Microsoft made a similar move into healthcare earlier this year when it announced the $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications.
Regulators in the United Kingdom, however, are opposing this. It’ll be fascinating to watch if this deal is subjected to the same level of regulatory scrutiny when it moves forward next year.
To read our blog on after Microsoft, Oracle is also reportedly looking to buy TikTok, click here.
