Oracle Buys Taleo

In acquisition news, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corp., a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt.

According to the press release:

Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.

The Board of Directors of Taleo has unanimously approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close mid-year 2012, subject to Taleo stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

“Taleo’s integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and gives companies the intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset — their people,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO, Taleo. “Joining forces with Oracle gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers.”

The move is simply a response to an industry move made late last year, says Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D blog:

The deal can’t help but be seen as a response to SAP’s acquisition last year of SuccessFactors, a Taleo rival. Indeed, Taleo’s shares have appreciated significantly in recent months – from $29 to $42 a share over the course of two weeks in December – on speculation that it would be the next cloud company to fall to the recent burst of acquisitions in the cloud software space.

And so it has.

And Fox Business news adds that ”the deal will plunge Oracle into even deeper competition with Salesforce.com, which provides web-based software for the  management of sales, marketing and customer service.”

Update: You may also want to check out some of the comments on the LinkedIn HR Technology Conference group. Apparently the acquisition has been rumored for a while. The insights from the members of that group are always worth reading

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