RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Software giant Oracle, which has a big presence in the Triangle, is about to grow substantially bigger.
The company – now headquartered in Austin, Texas – announced Monday its largest acquisition to date – a deal valued at $28.3 billion for Cerner Corporation.
The price is $95 a share. The deal is expected to close early next year. It’s “the biggest ever for Oracle,” CNBC reports.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) describes Cerner as a “leading provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems to enable medical professionals to deliver better healthcare to individual patients and communities.”
Oracle shares dipped slightly on the news.
“Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information—enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes,” said Larry Ellison, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Oracle, in the announcement. “With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications. This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs.”
