Two shocking announcements hit the tech world this week: Oracle’s founder and CEO announced that he would be stepping down into a chairman and technical role and Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP, said the company will be acquiring Concur for a whopping $8.3 billion.
These moves could have a negative effect on both Oracle and SAP. As is normal when a CEO steps down, change is on the horizon for Oracle. Taking McDermott’s spot are two CEOs, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, who used to work with Ellison. Both have a long history with Oracle, Hurd (former CEO of HP) has been with the company since 2010 and Catz for 15 years.
Even with McDermott stepping down, not much will change as far as who will handle certain departments. According to Oracle, Catz will continue to handle the finance side of things, Hurd will still be in charge of sales and services, and Ellison will handle engineering.
Could it be that Oracle is trying to distract from the fact they are still struggling to make a switch to cloud-based products and services? Even though the company still profits $8 million revenue quarters – they missed Wall Street estimates once again. Making changes in management could be a step in the right direction for Oracle; focusing their efforts on the future of cloud, rather than the past with database legacy.
The company is taking some major strides to implement change; this year they purchased Micros Systems at $5.3 billion.
Daniel Ives at FBR Capital Markets noted, “We believe Oracle will be aggressive on M+A over the coming year as it is clear, in our opinion, that Oracle needs to go on the ‘deal warpath’ to bulk up its product portfolio.”
SAP Building
Last December, Oracle and SAP fought to buy Responsys (a marketing automation company). Oracle won and purchased the company for $1.5 billion. Perhaps this is why SAP didn’t hesitate when it came to acquiring Concur. According to analysts there are new companies waiting to be snatched up: Splunk, Qlik, Tableau Software, and NetSuite (all worth anywhere from $2.5 to $6.5 billion).
Given that Oracle has appointed new leaders and there is a promising mix of competition – Let’s just say SaaS company’s are in luck.
Source: Forbes