Oracle Corp. announced yesterday it had entered into an agreement to acquire Micros Systems, a maker of point-of-sale and cloud-based customer engagement systems for hotels, QSRs, casinos, convenience stores, and cruise ships. It’s Oracle’s biggest deal since buying Sun Microsystems for $5.6 billion in 2009.
With Adobe, Salesforce, and IBM all competing aggressively in the marketing cloud space, Oracle may be looking to carve out vertical-specific territory to give it an edge and maintain some pricing authority.
“Micros has been focused on helping the world’s leading brands in our target markets since we were founded in 1977,” said Micros CEO Peter Altabef in a release announcing the deal. “In combination with Oracle, we expect to help accelerate our customers’ ability to innovate and differentiate their businesses by utilizing Oracle’s technologies, cloud solutions, and scale.”
In addition to supplying POS systems, Micros provides its hospitality customers with business intelligence, e-commerce systems, CRM, loyalty programs, and merchandise planning solutions. Its service stack includes interactive marketing, strategic business consulting, and design services.
Oracle EVP Bob Weiler noted that Micros management and employees will be integrated with the company as a dedicated business unit.
