February 13, 2012 UP IN THE CLOUD

Last Thursday, Oracle announced its acquisition of Taleo Corporation for about $1.9 billion. Taleo focuses on utilizing talent management processes in the cloud.

According to Oracle, one of the main goals of the transaction is to enable a wide range of organizations to better administer their human resource operations. With this deal, Oracle and Taleo are proving the importance of cloud solutions to the future of enterprise software.

We discussed Oracle’s and SAP’s continued expansion into cloud computing in our Software Industry M&A press release last month. Oracle acquired RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion while SAP, one its main rivals, acquired SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. Both of those transactions were announced in the Fourth Quarter of 2011.