From InfoWorld: Oracle's pending acquisition of retail and hospitality technology vendor Micros is its biggest since scooping up Sun Microsystems in 2010, which begs questions about why it's willing to pay so much.
Micros is going for $4.6 billion, net of its cash, while Sun cost Oracle $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net excluding its cash and debt. The Sun deal got a lot of buzz and scrutiny, given that it ushered Oracle into the hardware business and involved popular open-source technology such as MySQL going to a largely proprietary vendor.
Micros may not fundamentally change Oracle as much as Sun did, but it will help it adapt to the rapidly transforming world of retail and hospitality for a price tag that some financial analysts say is actually quite reasonable. Here's a look at the underlying reasons Oracle is making such a huge investment.
It's all about the data: While Oracle gains a huge customer base and family of well-established, widely used hardware and software products, the real prize may be the ever-increasing amounts of data that flow through Micros-powered POS (point of sale) systems. That information is closely linked with individual customers, providing insights into buying patterns, likes and dislikes, the performance of products and services, and their supply chains.
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