Oracle. Image: LCV/Shutterstock
In what would be one of the biggest acquisitions of the year, reports have emerged of Oracle’s interest in snapping up Accenture.
Valued at $78.8bn, Accenture’s consultancy services capabilities have caught the eye of an unlikely buyer, with rumours of a major acquisition on the cards.
The Register claims that Big Red has hired a team of “global specialists” to look into a potential purchase.
These specialists are apparently conducting due diligence in order to “explore the synergies that could be created if [Oracle] bought Accenture, lock, stock and barrel”.
“While these things have a habit of fizzling out, there are some fairly serious players around the table,” one source said.
Another, using more creative language, claimed: “If buying Accenture was a 100-metre race, Oracle is at the 10- to 15-metre stage now.”
The duo combined two years ago to form a new business group to help both companies’ customers “embrace the cloud to achieve their digital transformation goals”.
The pairing brought together 52,000 Oracle-skilled consultants globally, with an additional 20,000 Java-skilled professionals as part of the initiative.
While this is clearly going well, any acquisition would prove immensely expensive – that market valuation is hardly a flash in the pan.
Accenture’s growth in recent years was underlined when it revealed a new location in Dublin, with plans for increasing its workforce in the country to more than 2,200 after the latest push.
In the past 12 months, Oracle has been an active purchaser of companies.
Last July, in one of the largest acquisitions in its history, Oracle bought the world’s very first cloud software company, NetSuite, for $9.3bn in cash.
In September, cloud security company Palerra was also snapped up. Palerra said the acquisition will allow the companies to “accelerate cloud adoption securely”, with its platform merging with Oracle’s identity cloud service.
Then, before the end of 2016, Oracle swooped in to purchase Dyn’s “best-in-class DNS solution”, thereby extending Big Red’s cloud computing platform, providing enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
