Oracle will acquire NetSuite for about $9.3 billion, or $109 per share in an all-cash deal, the companies announced Thursday. Both Oracle and NetSuite’s cloud service offerings aimed at enterprise customers will continue to operate and “coexist in the marketplace forever,” according to a statement by Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.
Hurd called NetSuite and Oracle’s offerings “complementary” in the release, adding that Oracle intends to continue to invest in the engineering and distribution aspects of both company’s products going forward.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison already owned about 40% of NetSuite, so the deal will net him about $3.5 billion. NetSuite was the brainchild of Oracle cofounder Ellison, born in the same meeting that gave Benioff — who was an Oracle exec at the time — the idea for Salesforce.com. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson worked with Ellison, Benioff, and another key player, Evan Goldberg, at Oracle in the 1990s. Goldberg thought up the idea of software as a service, says Nelson.
Eighteen-year-old NetSuite claims a dominant position in the cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) space, which includes offerings to help businesses track supply and demand, inventory, accounting, customer relationships (CRM) and HR. The ERP industry has been an active space for M&A and general consolidation over the past few years, and Oracle in general has been an aggressive acquirer of smaller companies throughout 2016, with recent pick-ups including Opower and Textura.
