Oracle closed another significant acquisition over the Labor Day weekend, adding Netsure Telecom, an Irish network intelligence and data integrity software developer, to its ever-expanding, communications-software arsenal.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Netsure becomes the latest addition to Oracle’s Communications Global Business unit which develops communications-specific applications to service providers around the globe.
“The addition of Netsure’s products to Oracle’s comprehensive communications applications suite is expected to help Oracle’s customers improve network utilization, optimize capacity planning and financial modeling and streamline end-to-end network lifecycle management,” said Bhaskar Gorti, Oracle senior vice president and general manager, in a prepared release.
In its dogged and unrelenting quest to overtake SAP as the world’s largest business software provider, Oracle has invested heavily in the communications software segment in the past two years. In April 2006, it shelled out $220 million to snap up Portal Software.
Oracle also picked up HotSip, MetaSolve Software, Net4Call and Telephony@Work in the past year and change, giving it what it calls an end-to-end packaged software suite tailored for the communications industry.
“The Oracle acquisition spree continues with no sign of a slowdown,” David Mitchell, senior vice president of research at Ovum, a UK-based IT consulting and research firm, said in a research report. “Oracle has always been a major software player in the communications industry with market-share dominance in its database technology. The string of acquisitions has turned it into an even more significant player in the market.”
Netsure’s Active Network Optimization software provides network optimization, capacity planning and trending and network financial modeling. Its Reconciler product improves network data integrity for communications service providers. Both products, Mitchell said, position Oracle to provide software infrastructure support to the growing Next Generation Network (NGN) phenomenon.
On Friday, Bridgestream, a San Francisco-based company that develops software used to map business relationships within an organization, confirmed its union with Oracle. In July, Oracle also acquired Bharosa, a provider of fraud prevention and authentication security software.
Analysts predict Oracle will continue to gobble up specific, strategic application developers in the months ahead.
“Larry Ellison was asked at he end of Oracle’s last fiscal year whether Oracle would continue to make more acquisitions,” Mitchell said in his report. “His response was robust, indicating that the market should expect it to make at least as many acquisitions in the year ahead. The Netsure transaction shows that he is going to keep his word.”
