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Oracle Buys NetSuite for $9.3B
- kordless 10y agoWe're seeing brutal, brutal consolidation now. Better buckle up.
- jomamaxx 10y agoF Oracle.
- jomamaxx 10y agoOracle is not an innovation machine, they are a value capture machine. They seek to monopolize rents in zero-sum games, lock in customers and suck $ out of businesses and large government entities. All companies do this on some level, but as long as they are adding a lot of value, it's a fair deal. The Oracle Shogunate doesn't care about growing the pie, just grabbing more pieces of it.
- cptskippy 10y agoOracle is just an elaborate money making machine for Larry Ellison. It's sole purpose is to make sure he can still sail boats in his back yard.
- DoubleMalt 10y agoAt least it is not a software I use an like, that is devoured by Oracle this time. (Of course Oracle makes great stuff. In a company as big as Oracle, there are always niches that create great things. But most offerings are dreadful. And most open source acquisitions did not fare especially well under Oracle)
- cowmix 10y agoVirtualBox has done quite well under Oracle.
- bhouston 10y agoI'm pretty sure that the market for VB, like VMWare is being eaten very quickly by lxc-based alternatives like Docker. Probably a bad thing for VB in the medium to long term.
- stephenr 10y agoOnly in the "tech fanboy who doesn't actually understand VMs vs Containers" space, which admittedly is quite a big space right now. For OS X/Windows hosts the only thing keeping VirtualBox around is the price tag. No one is going to pay for the commercial version with the terrible performance it has. If you're willing to part with $ you have much better options. On OS X I think new players like Veertu will further displace VirtualBox even in the $0 category.
- Nullabillity 10y agoVeertu doesn't seem like a contender in the $0 category either, considering that the website has statements like "with free tier to run Linux VMs". Since no actual price is mentioned I'd assume that it's in the "if you have to ask..." category.
- jevinskie 10y agoHuh? Veertu Premium is a $40 IAP. https://itunes.apple.com/app/veertu/id1024069033 https://itunes.apple.com/app/veertu/id1024069033
- Nullabillity 10y agoGood luck finding that on their website.
- stephenr 10y agoThey link to their Mac App Store page, which shows the IAP pricing for the upgrade.
- ryporter 10y agoDid Larry Ellison just transfer billions of dollars from himself to himself in a taxable transaction? I'm surprised the deal was all cash.
- omgitstom 10y agoAcquisitions are complicated in tax law. There was a good write-up about this in Forbes about a year ago that your question reminded me of: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2015/10/05/tax-geek-tuesday-a-buyers-best-friend-understanding-the-section-338h10-election/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2015/10/05/tax-geek... I honestly don't know the answer to your question, though.
- unreal37 10y agoOne could argue that Oracle's money is not technically his. This is how he gets a large share of Oracle's money into his own personal accounts without having to give other shareholders anything.
- mr-ron 10y agoLarry Ellison owns 45.4% of Netsuite Stock. This means he is aiming to make $3.75 Billion from this trade. Holy crap.
- mc32 10y agoBut he still had to buy/acquire that 45% of stock. That proportion didn't just land in his pocket. Of course it's appreciated over time.
- raiyu 10y agoLarry Ellison is a very interesting business leader. From reading accounts looks like he is a very dynamic business leader inside of Oracle. Certainly there are both positive and negative interactions. But he was also supportive of some of his top people leaving to start their own companies that have gone on to do really well. Often times he would invest into their businesses and personally capture upside. On a long enough time line many of those businesses also went on to become direct competitors. So not surprised to see that he has a stake in the business, though have 45% is pretty amazing.
- thansharp 10y agoCan you name his competitors? I can only recall Salesforce, although I don't know the extent to which their offerings overlap.
- icebraining 10y agoSAP and Microsoft Dynamics are the biggest, IIRC.
- toyg 10y agoFor the record, Salesforce was founded with Larry's money by Larry's employees -- pretty much like NetSuite, in fact.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chollida1 10y ago> The relationship between Oracle and NetSuite goes back decades. Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s CEO, previously ran Oracle’s marketing operations in the 1990s. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison is NetSuite’s largest investor. As of March, Ellison and his family owned about 45.4 percent of NetSuite’s common stock, according to a company filing. Ellison has “control over approval of significant corporate transactions,’’ according to the filing. Hmm, I wonder if the NetSuite board will approve this:) Man, Microsoft has its OS and Office revenue to Google and Facebook have their advertising revenue Oracle has its licensing revenue Amazon has its everything store revenue. Apple has its iPhone revenue. The big tech incumbents all figuratively print money each quarter. If the long reported bubble burst ever gets around to happening, it's hard not to see them as the big winners. With piles of cash on hand and cash reserves growing can anyone make the case that they don't become the lender of last resort to cash strapped startups? Side note, I'm surprised that Oracle is still running with Safra Catz and Mark Hurd as co-CEO's. I figured that that setup along with a very strong willed founder in Ellison, would cause some spectacular implosion at some point:)
- ethbro 10y agoCan't Amazon, Google, and Facebook (less sure about the others) all essentially be characterized as Berkshire Hathaway? I.e. Develop a business that generates large cash flows, then relentlessly plow that money into more profitable side ventures. Except in this case they didn't buy an insurance company and instead developed a product that generated those flows.
- heisenbit 10y agoThey may use lot's of cash, they may be plowing, they may be relentless but their track record is decidedly mixed. Building franchises from smaller seedlings is hard and risky. Not comparable with Berkshire Hathaway that focuses on low risk investments. They are more acting like venture funds. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have managed to build some new profitable businesses over time with Amazon having done the greatest leap. The advertisement giants seem to struggle to gain traction - lots of projects but revenue streams less impressive.
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- HenryTheHorse 10y agoThis news is interesting because with NetSuite's acquisition, it leaves no significant SMB SaaS player for SAP or MSFT to acquire immediately. All eyes are on their next announcement. Anybody got a few hundred million sitting around and wants to build another SaaS ERP/SCM solution? :)
- iamgopal 10y agoI'm dying to build one and have very good idea how it could differentiate itself to reach such levels...
- HenryTheHorse 10y agoBrilliant. What's stopping you? (Other than hundred million dollars and an enterprise sales team?)
- iamgopal 10y agohaha, it's always hundred million. Core idea is to use AI to convert simple todo list in to process driven smart software automatically. ( I know execution counts much more, and If someone copy / already does that, please let me know )
- HenryTheHorse 10y agoIMO, that space (minus the AI component) is occupied by BPM and workflow automation platforms. But what a business needs is an application and not a platform. So if you have a specific business problem and a use-case in mind and can prototype a solution, you can find a company to at least hear out your pitch. Good luck with your idea!
- iamgopal 10y agoSMB do not have well defined processes, if I can enter whatever that I am doing and if it can be converted to process which other can follow without come up with one themselves, effectively I'm transferring the intellectuals or experience down the line, which will enable me to grow organically instead of thinking out all of business growth and processes beforehand. Another advantage is the existing process can be improved organically. May be I should make a demo to explain it better....
- weavie 10y agoOn a slight, but related side note, is there a way to stop Chrome from auto playing audio when you first open a web page? I'm supposed to be working here - not surfing Hacker News!
- brianwawok 10y agoVolume on mute is clutch
- hackaflocka 10y agoI've never understood why Oracle was so highly valued by Wall St. Databases have always had FLOSS alternatives. So how did an expensive proprietary solution (with lots of closed and open competitors) become so all-powerful and valuable? On a related note: anybody on here want to work on some kind of innovative enterprise database startup? (I don't have any ideas, I just want to work on one because I see a lot of potential).
- 50CNT 10y agoSalesmanship i guess.
- rlucas 10y agoOracle hasn't been a "database" company for a long, long time now. (You can license the RDBMS but that's not the real business.) Yes, they have a very robust database. But what they've been selling to enterprises for at least 20 years is better thought of as ... schema. When you buy Oracle Financials (or whatever modules / pieces / etc.) what you're buying is "how to set up and run your business." All of the non-physical parts of your business operations are now entities inside Oracle SW (and, as it happens, stored in the Oracle RDBMS, too, but that's practically speaking irrelevant). Once you're "on" Oracle, or SAP, or whatever, every invoice you send out exists only because it's in that software. The software is your system of record, your single point of truth for your whole enterprise. You might think you are physically a human employee or a box of nuts but if you're not entered into Oracle with a row ID, you don't exist. So, yeah, Oracle has an RDBMS. But what they really have is the "operating system" or the "schema" of a large enterprise which otherwise would have to rely upon a vast pyramid of specialist operational knowledge (bureaucrats / paper pushers / functionaries) in order to know how invoices got approved, sent, dunned, paid, reconciled, etc., or how orders got quoted, approved, picked, packed, shipped, etc. (Not meant to sound condescending; I certainly wouldn't have known had I not spent some time seeing Oracle deployed in real life. It was certainly super-instructive for me to have spent a summer during college working for a midsize enterprise on Oracle, in a role kind of bridging ops and IT, and seeing what it really did. No SELECT statements involved.)
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- mark_l_watson 10y agoAt first I thought this purchase was a "holy batshit batman" event, but because of ""Oracle, which sells software to big corporations, has been trying to shift to cloud-based products, which made up only about 8 percent of total sales in its fiscal fourth-quarter."" then I guess it makes sense.
- markpapadakis 10y agoOn perhaps unrelated note, I think it'd be important for NetSuite to make sure their site's up the day Oracle buys them out, otherwise it 'd make both them and Oracle look bad. ( http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml, click on Free product tour - Oops )
- ayyn0n0n0 10y agoWorking for me at the moment.
- markpapadakis 10y agoExcellent. I was genuinely interested to learn about their product.
- tw04 10y agoI would imagine we'll continue to see Oracle acquire mature software companies that are built upon their database. It makes a ton of sense for them - they instantly cut the primary cost of the business (Oracle licensing). Quite frankly the Oracle licensing alone will probably justify the purchase price. As long as it isn't a startup where the braintrust instantly fleeing makes the product essentially worthless, it makes sound business sense.
- tuna-piano 10y agoI don't think this makes any difference at all (besides possibly tax reasons... I'm no expert). I wouldn't think there's much operational synergy between owning a customer. But you seem to imply a financial reason. Say Netsuite's Oracle fee was $1M a year. If Oracle acquires them, Netsuite saves $1M a year sure, but Oracle also loses $1M year in external revenue. The result is the same.
- tw04 10y agoFor starters, they aren't paying a not-so-insignificant portion of that GP to a sales guy. There are absolutely tax benefits to it. And finally they don't have the cost of support, which can be quite large, of taking care of an external entity.
- godzillabrennus 10y agoSeems like a perfect marriage. The oracle cloud transition is a work in progress from what I can tell so this solves part of that problem for them.
- oriel 10y agoAm I the only one looking at the NetSuite patent list and trying not to foresee Oracle's next move. Ref: http://stks.freshpatents.com/Netsuite-nm1.php http://stks.freshpatents.com/Netsuite-nm1.php
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