Oracle to pay $1.9 billion for Taleo, extends SAP rivalry
The proposed purchase announced Thursday extends Oracle's offerings in a growing arena of computing known as the cloud. With such an approach, businesses don't run software and services in-house. Instead, those tasks are dispatched over the Internet to remote locations operated by companies such as Oracle, SAP and IBM.
Oracle ( ORCL ), which is based in Redwood Shores , Calif., pounced on Taleo ( TLEO ) just two months after SAP struck a deal to buy a similar Silicon Valley software service, SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion. It also comes as another rapidly growing company called Workday is emerging as a cloud-computing threat in human-resources software.
"It's a defensive measure to some extent," Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman said.
Oracle said Taleo's portfolio of products would complement Oracle's existing offerings.
"Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations," Thomas Kurian, an executive vice president at Oracle, said in a statement.