Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Oracle’s Fifth Deal of 2012 Is for Skire

Enterprise software giant Oracle made its fifth acquisition of the year. It announced that it will acquire the assets of Skire, a maker of cloud-based software used to manage capital projects, facilities and real estate.

Skire is privately held and relatively small, so the financial terms aren’t being disclosed. Oracle says it will combine its assets with its existing Oracle Primavera line of products. Primavera was a company devoted to software built for the engineering and construction industries that Oracle acquired in 2008.

It’s another step by Oracle in filling out its software-as-a-service offerings. The big one this year, of course, was Taleo, a SaaS-based human capital management application, which it grabbed for $1.9 billion. The other big one in recent memory was RightNow, which it acquired for $1.4 billion last October.

Oracle has also been buying up companies in the social space — three so far this year, to be exact. Earlier this month, it acquired Involver. That deal came after the acquisitions of Collective Intellect in June and Vitrue in May. Prices on all three were officially undisclosed, though Vitrue was reported to have sold for about $300 million.

IBM acquired a software company called Tririga that overlapped somewhat with Skire in the space of managing real estate.

Skire’s customers include ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, Qualcomm, Bank of America and Roche.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus