It was just another shopping day for acquisitive Oracle Corp. The software titan in Redwood Shores, Calif., said Monday it would buy Metasolv Software Inc. for about $219.2 million to expand Operations Support System, or OSS, offerings for customers, according to an article on TheDeal.com and MarketWatch.com.
The $4.10 a share cash offer represents a nearly 23.5% premium to the target's closing share price Friday of $3.32 a share, and is 60 cents above Metasolv stock's 52-week high, $3.50 a share, hit Friday before the deal was announced. Metasolv, of Plano, Tex., provides OSS technology for media and communications companies.
Oracle expects to close the deal later in 2006 or early in 2007. Once it does, Metasolv employees will join Oracle's communications global business unit.
For Oracle, the deal was a relatively small one, after completing its $5.85 billion purchase of Siebel Systems Inc., a maker of customer relationship management software, in January and enterprise software maker PeopleSoft Inc. for $10.3 billion in January 2005. Oracle has also acquired numerous other companies, including open source software group Sleepycat Software Inc., and Demantra Inc., a maker of sales and inventory management software, both for an undisclosed sums, and in July, Portal Software Inc., a provider of billing and revenue management software for the communications and media industry, for about $220 million. In August, Oracle completed its purchase of the intellectual property assets of Sigma Dynamics Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of predictive analytics technology, and earlier this month, Oracle announced plans to acquire data integration products provider Sunopsis Inc. of Burlington, Mass. for undisclosed terms.
Oracle has spent more than $20 billion over the past few years to snap up smaller rivals and technology. One of Oracle's biggest challenges is completing its Fusion project, an attempt to meld Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and other applications into one integrated suite. Oracle, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards & Co. (which PeopleSoft acquired in June 2003 for $1.7 billion) and Siebel are all still sold as separate product lines by their own sales forces. Oracle wants to become a one-stop shop — offering customers middleware, database software to manage their computerized information and applications such as CRM and human resources software. The company expects to unveil a completed Fusion product sometime in 2008, which many experts deem an overly ambitious deadline.
Oracle still may look to do deals, with future targets including a large business intelligence vendor such as a Burlington, Mass.-based Cognos Inc. or Hyperion Solutions Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif; BMC Software Inc., a Houston-based provider of business services management software; or BEA Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif., middleware vendor. — Cheryl Meyer
Continue reading below
