Oracle Buying Micros Systems For $5.3 Billion

An anonymous reader writes Oracle is buying hospitality and retail technology vendor Micros Systems for $5.3 billion, in a deal that will be its largest since the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. "Oracle said the acquisition will extend its offerings by combining Micros' industry-specific applications with its business applications, technologies and cloud portfolio. Oracle expects the deal to immediately add to its adjusted earnings. Its stock climbed 18 cents to $41 before the market opened. Micros' board unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the second half of the year."

Comments

Gold Finger

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is like the gold finger, everything they touch turns to gold and dies

Re:Gold Finger

[Jane Q. Public]

This.

I just have to wonder, honestly, how they're still in business.

They must have a hardcore, resistant-to-change, corporate user base keeping them afloat. Because frankly I don't know anyone in the industry anymore who likes Oracle or wants to do business with them.

(Even the hosting companies I deal with replaced MySQL with MariaDB, behind the scenes. No issues with the changeovers, and better performance.)

Don't misunderstand me: for enterprise-scale users they might have something to offer. But for just about everybody else, they pretended they were going to offer and just dropped the ball. How many times now?

Re:Gold Finger

[HeckRuler]

From an "enterprise-scale" company, which uses Oracle for their timesheet reporting, let me be the first to inform you that Oracle blows goats. The damn thing crashes if you try to type in text and enter number at the same time. We also have an Oracle database for parts which they've wanted to change for years. YEARS. But switching away is hard and costly and so we limp along with the system we have.

Oracle is where technology goes to die. And those rotting corpses are weighing down corporate America. Oracle has them locked into contracts and has chained those corpses to the corporations where they dangle like nooses, dragging us all down into the pit of obscurity and obsolesces.

But maybe I'm being too hard on them for making me fill out a timecard twice.

Re:Gold Finger

[drinkypoo]

I just have to wonder, honestly, how they're still in business.

They have arguably the best RDBMS in the business, they have fat stacks of government contracts, and they obviously have an incredibly effective sales team. Seems like they actually have a lot going for them to me, even if they are horrible in every other way. Government customers don't give a shit about software freedom, or any other kind of freedom. Not this government, anyway.

Re:Gold Finger

[The Snowman]

Oracle is like the gold finger, everything they touch turns to gold and dies

As an ex-employee of Micros' retail division in Solon, Ohio, I can honestly say they do not need the help here. Micros (Retail) is already rotting from the inside out.

I do not expect Oracle coming in to save the day. There has already been too much brain drain and customers are already dropping them as a vendor. Big customers. Think $10 million and larger contracts, poof, like a fart in the wind.

Micros has some really good products, it is the services that kill them. While profitable, they add an exponential amount of work to the delivery and open them up to liabilities. Oracle will likely come in and say "one size (ours) will fit all." And that would probably be the best for everyone.

And, of course ...

[gstoddart]

I'm sure this also gets Oracle access to all of that tasty data, which they can monetize, sell, or otherwise mis-handle.

I also predict a lot of smaller businesses getting completely gouged by their new overlords on their licensing costs. What do you mean I need to buy a Solaris server with a 10 year service plan to get to my existing data?

Re:And, of course ...

[pegr]

You don't need to buy Micros to get your hands on that data!

(Hint: Micros has suffered some really bad breaches in the past, basically hanging their customers out to dry.)

Re:And, of course ...

[gstoddart]

Hmmmm ... so, are customers safer with an incompetent company, or a malicious and greedy company?

It's so hard to keep track these days.

Re:And, of course ...

[Shortguy881]

Having worked directly with both of these companies, micros as a competing point of sale company and oracle as a base infrastructure for a telcom company, I can say both charge roughly the same for hourly support. On one hand, we still own all data that goes through oracle systems while micros owns the data on their point of sales computers. If you switch pos companies, you lose access to all historical data.

Re:And, of course ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you have never heard of "PCI compliance" have you?

Pretty obvious what happened here.

[squiggleslash]

Let me guess. Larry Ellison got an SMS a few days ago saying

Good news Dear Leader, I have discovered that for only $5.3B we can buy Micros

and he thought the message was truncated?

Re:Tip please?

[ColdWetDog]

Seems we'll be tipping Larry Ellison every time we check in to a Hilton now.

I think you have this just a little bit backwards.

Re:In other news

[ogdenk]

You jest but it's happening.... Subway recently dumped them as a POS supplier and will not support any new Micros installs and are hesitant to support older ones. They moved on to HP and Par. We went with Par for what should be obvious reasons for our locations.

Personally, I think Windows-based POS systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen. Doesn't matter who the supplier is, the OS vendor remains the same in most cases.

If Subway ported their POS software to run on top on Linux or BSD I'd be a much happier man and sleep more soundly at night. The Par POS hardware is awesome, various retail chains' choice of OS and lack of sensible security practices is still as much a problem as it was with Micros.

Re:But ... why?

[supremebob]

Perhaps they want to kill off SAP's Sybase division once and for all.

I believe that Micros was one of the last big support contracts that Sybase still had. Now that Oracle owns them, you can be pretty guarantee that new version of Micros ReS will have an Oracle backend.

But, hey, Sybase is a Dead Division Walking already. When was the last time you heard about them getting a NEW Fortune 500 contract?

Microsoft, Oracle, IBM rule enterprise software

[Flytrap]

This article may help you understand why Oracle continues to grow (they just surpassed IBM in revenues from enterprise software sales).

To summarise it quickly for you:

• Worldwide software revenue totalled $407.3bn last year
• Microsoft continues to be the unquestionable enterprise software giant
• Oracle which narrowly overtook IBM is in second place
• Oracle's strong showing was thanks to trends such as big data and analytics.
• The software industry is in the middle of a "multiyear cyclical transition"
• Cloud is driving the bulk of this change
• Pure cloud player Salesforce.com is now the tenth largest enterprise software vendor

Many of the top 10 enterprise software companies are not sexy brands, and most do not even have any consumer products or services. Names that dominate this list include Oracle, IBM, SAP, EMC, CA Technologies and Salesforce.com.

There is a bright side

[attemptedgoalie]

At least Oracle is cheap.

oh, right.

Bastards. I am sitting here rebalancing my vmware cluster to pull more cores out of Oracle so we can license less. Will it run slower? Yeah. But will we save six or seven figures a year? Yep.