Oracle has
acquired Taleo Corp., a cloud-based talent-management provider, for $1.9
billion.
According to a
Feb. 9 statement, Oracle intends to use Taleo’s assets to “create a
comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their human resource
operations and employee careers.” In addition to streamlining the on-boarding
of new hires and reducing costs associated with HR processes, the resulting
platform will apparently leverage social media as a means of enhancing
collaboration between employees.
“Taleo’s
integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations
hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and give companies the
intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset—their people,”
Michael Gregoire, Taleo’s chairman and CEO, wrote in a Feb. 9 statement.
Oracle is
making deeper forays into the cloud, with an eye toward challenging rivals such
as Salesforce.com and Microsoft. Its plans encompass Web-based enterprise apps
centered on customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management
(HCM) and social-networking tools. Oracle’s Public Cloud offers a combination
of applications, middleware and database software hosted and managed by the
company, fronted by social-networking software.
“Oracle’s
announcement of intent to acquire Taleo is the latest in an aggressive and
competitive wave of market consolidation in the cloud-based Human Capital
Management (HCM) space,” Tim Jennings, chief analyst at Ovum, wrote in a Feb. 9
statement, “which has seen SAP acquire Success Factors and Salesforce.com
acquire Rypple.”
These
acquisitions, he added, “indicate the increasing acceptance of the software as
a service (SaaS) model, with HCM following in the footsteps of CRM as the next
SaaS battleground.”
Oracle is also
applying the cloud to stricter verticals, including health care. In October,
Oracle Health Science introduced OutcomeLogix On Demand 3.0, a Web-based
application that enables life-science companies and contract research
organizations to collect data on the outcome of various therapy treatments in
late-stage trials. OutcomeLogix runs in the Oracle Health Sciences Cloud, a
Web-based infrastructure that Oracle intends to speed up IT deployments and
reduce the IT infrastructure needed to run health care applications.
Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison has made no secret of his company’s plans to move into the cloud
on its own terms. In September 2010, Oracle introduced the Exalogic “cloud in a
box” system for implementing self-contained cloud environments, leveraging
hardware from the then-newly acquired Sun subsidiary and a highly integrated
Oracle software stack of database, middleware and applications.
In the
enterprise-cloud space, Oracle’s most high-profile opponents include
Salesforce, whose cloud solutions emphasize Facebook- and Twitter-style social
networking; Microsoft, which markets a variety of cloud-based platforms for Web
developers and office workers; and SAP, which is expanding aggressively into
mobility.
Follow
Nicholas Kolakowski on Twitter
Cloud Computing News & Reviews 
