Oracle Buys Cloud Services Provider Opower For Utilities Vertical Push

Oracle has acquired cloud-services provider Opower, a company that specialises in cloud for the utilities industry.

The acquisition is the latest in a string of acquisitions and releases from Oracle in an attempt to strengthen its cloud services offerings and amass a collection of cloud products for specific verticals.

Just last week Oracle bought Textura Corp, a company that offers cloud services for the construction industry. That deal was valued at $663 million (£452m).

This week’s acquisition comes in a $10.30 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $532 million (£362m), net of Opower’s cash.

National Grid

Some of Opower’s big name customers include the National Grid, PG&E, and Exelon.
Opower provides a big data platform that stores and analyses more than 600 billion meter readings from 60 million end customers.

Rodger Smith, Oracle general manager for its utilities business, said that the utilities industry needs modern technology solutions to meet customer and compliance need.

Utilities

Dan Yates, Opower’s CEO, said: “The combination will provide the industry with the most modern, complete cloud applications for the entire utility value chain, from meter to grid to end-customers. We are excited to join Oracle and to bring even more value to our customers as part of the Oracle Utilities Industry Cloud Platform.”

Last month, Oracle made moves to woo customers concerned about data privacy by letting them deploy Oracle’s public cloud in their own data centres.

Dubbed Oracle Cloud at Customer, Oracle’s expanded services are a workaround to feats from organisations who, whilst eager to move enterprise workloads to the cloud, have been held back by legislative or regulatory requirements.

“The new PaaS and IaaS services can be deployed wherever an organisation chooses—in the Oracle Cloud or in their own data centre,” said Oracle.

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