Oracle’s Recent Acquisition of NetSuite is anything but Business as Usual. Here’s What You Missed.

Organizations strategically acquire other organizations every day—it’s but one move in the cyclical dynamic of enterprise growth. Every once in a while, though, one of those acquisitions warrants a big-picture discussion, not just a press release. Oracle’s late-July, $9.3 billion-dollar acquisition of NetSuite is one of those instances.

Here are the cliff notes: Oracle is a large-scale enterprise database provider specializing in software that powers global transportation systems, manufacturers, and banks. They’re great at that, but not so great when it comes to cloud. In fact, they’ve been known to lag in the cloud arena. NetSuite, on the other hand, is a cloud-first company best known for their SaaS Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) models targeted to SMBs.

While Oracle’s purchase is clearly a move into the global cloud space, there are other implications, too: By acquiring NetSuite, Oracle appears to be dropping its enterprise-only goggles and taking a step toward fulfilling the SaaS needs of the very large SMB market. This is a shift of a Fortune 500 company’s entire organizational priorities, not just a $9.3 billion nod to cloud.

While we’re here, let’s talk about that amount of money for a minute. It’s a significant investment, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work. Oracle can’t solve its cloud problem by throwing money at it alone—they’ll need a clear, scalable strategy that speaks to their customers in a language they can understand.

Over on our property Futurum, we specialize in bringing you top-notch research and analysis into issues that affect the convergence of emerging technologies, business, and culture. It’s the logical place to dive into the reason behind Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite, what it means to the competitive cloud market, and even what they may have up their sleeves when it comes to cloud-backed artificial intelligence (AI).

Join us as we go beyond the headlines, the money, and the merge. Read: What Oracle’s Acquisition of NetSuite Means

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