Oracle buying NetSuite for $9.3B

When Evan Goldberg founded NetSuite in 1998, he did so with backing from his former boss, Lawrence Ellison, who started the software giant Oracle.

On Thursday, their relationship came full circle as Oracle agreed to acquire NetSuite for $9.3 billion to beef up its cloud offerings.

Oracle will pay $109 a NetSuite share in cash, according to a news release issued by Oracle on Thursday. That represents a 19 percent premium above NetSuite’s closing price Wednesday.

The NetSuite deal is Oracle’s largest acquisition since it bought PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion in 2004, according to data from Standard & Poor’s Global Market Intelligence. That deal, a hostile takeover fought out over 18 months, extended Oracle’s customer base and product offerings.

It made Oracle bigger, but it did not change its business model. About 5,000 PeopleSoft employees, close to half the company, were laid off in the following months.

The NetSuite purchase, on the other hand, is at the heart of Oracle’s fight to remake itself for the modern world of cloud computing, or providing accessing to vast computational resources over the internet. Ellison, through personal and family holdings, owns more than 40 percent of NetSuite.

— From wire reports