Musings on Oracle World Domination…and the Taleo Acquisition
Posted on Mon, Feb 13, 2012 @ 12:32 PM
By Edward Jackson, President
Larry Ellison stated that Oracle was slowing down on M&A a year ago. At the time, he made the remark of SaaS that “If you look at the leader, Salesforce.com, they don’t make very much money and they’ve been at it for almost 10 years.” Now enter Taleo acquisition yesterday which is very much a poster board SaaS company and cited in most SaaS company benchmarks. One quick reaction is this is simply a “me too” response to SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors. However, I think it a combination of both a need to respond to SAP’s bold move as well as a growing acceptance (…and acquisition) of cloud/SaaS based companies. It is a new era in the M&A tent at Oracle for sure.
For us at Provade, we see a strong opportunity to continue our all Oracle focus. Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo not only strengthens the ‘red’ stack offering, but makes it a dominant player particularly when combined with its other HCM offerings such as iRecruit (eBusiness Suite) and Talent Management (PeopleSoft). This acquisition should make Oracle THE dominant ATS and recruiting provider in the market place.
Here at Provade, we look forward to extending integrations into Taleo and supporting our Oracle based customers on such. It has long been my belief that the poor man versions of ATS/Recruiting that exist in some of the VMS tools would never be a match to Taleo. With Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo, it is hard to debate the utility of inferior functionality vis a vis the leading tool in the market with the might and backing of Oracle. We look forward to the close of the transaction this summer and the deeper ties that will bring with our Oracle product partnership and this exciting new acquisition.