Oracle Beefs Up Cloud Portfolio With Instantis Acquisition

Oracle has opened its cheque book again after it beefed up its business product catalogue with the acquisition of Instantis, a vendor of cloud- and premises-based Project Portfolio Management (PPM) applications and services.

In an announcement 8 November, Oracle said it will combine the features and capabilities of Instantis applications with Oracle’s own Primavera and Fusion applications to improve them for their customers.

Project Management

“Organisations realise the need for a more simplified approach to address project portfolio management initiatives – and yet most solutions are too complicated and expensive to deploy,” Mike Sicilia, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Primavera, said in a statement. “By adding Instantis, Oracle can help customers gain complete visibility and control of their mission-critical project initiatives using a top-down approach suited for projects throughout the entire organisation.”

PPM applications help businesses manage, track and report on their overall operations and strategies – from capital construction and maintenance to manufacturing, IT, new-product development, Lean Six Sigma, and other corporate initiatives, according to Oracle.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Instantis customers include Ingram Micro, Dupont, Xerox, Genentech, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Cardinal Health, Credit Suisse, Verizon, TD Bank and the United States Postal Service.

Acquisition Spree

The deal is the latest in a growing string of corporate acquisitions by Oracle since the start of 2012.

In September, Oracle bought SelectMinds, a provider of cloud-based software which uses social media to find talent and manage corporate alumni relationships. SelectMinds provides social media-based talent sourcing and alumni management and recruiting software applications delivered through the cloud. The SelectMinds portfolio will be integrated with existing Oracle Cloud Recruiting, Performance Management and Human Capital Management applications.

SelectMinds was founded in 2000 and is based in New York City. Its customers include eBay, McGraw-Hill, Qualcomm and Visa.

The acquisition of SelectMinds helped Oracle extend its enterprise social media business. That led to the release in September of a new social relationship management platform based on three other acquisitions. Vitrue, which it acquired in May, is a creator of cloud-based social media marketing campaigns, while Collective Intellect, which it acquired in June, is a cloud-based software product that helps companies understand and respond to consumers’ conversations on social media platforms. Involver, which it acquired in July, created a social media software development platform.

In July, Oracle acquired Xsigo, which virtualises and accelerates data streams to make IT more efficient. With that acquisition, Oracle immediately took the inside lane in the virtual networking space over some big-name competitors – such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell – none of which has anything like this technology in-house.

In February, Oracle purchased Taleo, which offers cloud-based human resources applications and services for businesses, for $1.9 billion (£1.2bn).

Oracle unveiled its new Oracle Social Relationship Management Platform in October at its Oracle OpenWorld event, including links to a whole range of Oracle software as a service (SaaS) applications for human resources, customer relationship management (CRM), sales, marketing, finance, recruiting and more.

Given the success of mass-marketed social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, enterprises such as Oracle are developing their own social-media-like platforms for reaching out to their customers and partners. VMware acquired Socialcast in 2011, Salesforce.com has Chatter and acquired Buddy Media for $700 million (£437m), and Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion (£750m) in June.

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Originally published on eWeek.