Oracle added to its growing cloud services roster April 28 by acquiring publicly traded Textura, a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services for about $663 million in cash, net of Textura’s liquid assets.
The purchase price amounted to $26 per share, exactly the price at which the stock closed April 28.
Oracle is looking increasingly like Salesforce every day. The cloud services business is a direction the company needs to follow as its enterprise hardware sales continue to slip each quarter.
Textura says its cloud services process about $3.4 billion in payments for more than 6,000 projects each month. The company provides its cloud services in a consumption model preferred by the engineering and construction industry, in which the companies involved pay based on project activity.
In addition, Textura said, usage of its cloud services creates a network effect of sorts that benefits participants because more than 85,000 general and subcontractors are connected to the platform and benefit by shared information and economies of scale.
Oracle said it will integrate Textura into its Primavera software to fill out its construction services offering. The Redwood City, Calif.-based IT giant bought Primavera, which makes project management software for the construction industry, back in 2008.
Oracle Primavera offers a suite of cloud solutions for project, cost, time and risk management. The Oracle Primavera flagship products have been completely re-architected for the cloud, and the result is a set of cloud services that are growing rapidly as construction and engineering companies embrace digital transformation. Together, Oracle Primavera and Textura will form the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit offering a comprehensive cloud-based project control and execution platform that manages all phases of engineering and construction projects.
Cloud is the fastest-growing part of Oracle’s business. Oracle Cloud currently has about 63 million users and carries an average of 23 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud runs on 30,000 devices and uses 400 petabytes of storage in 19 data centers around the world.
Textura’s mission, according to CEO David Habinger, is “to bring workflow automation and transparency to complex construction projects while improving their financial performance and minimizing risks.”
Twelve-year-old Textura, based in Deerfield, Ill., went public in June 2013, yet has never reported a profit. In its last fiscal year, it recorded $87 million in revenue with a net loss of nearly $17 million. It had about $79 million in cash on hand at the time of the acquisition.
The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to approval by Textura stockholders.