Deals

Oracle has announced it is acquiring the cloud-based talent management provider
Taleo. It is paying $46 per share, or approximately $1.9 billion, net of Taleo's cash and debt. Taleo's board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close mid-year 2012, subject to Taleo stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.

Oracle has scooped up RightNow Technologies for a reported $1.5 billion. The acquisition price is a hefty 20 percent premium over RightNow's closing price last week. The acquisition fills a missing gap in Oracle's cloud-based CRM functionality. The deal also provides an excellent exit strategy for RightNow, especially as competition continues to become more intense, said Nucleus Research Vice President Rebecca Wettemann.

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries' customers.

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday.

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku, a cloud application platform. It will pay about $212 million in cash, net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of January 2011 if everything goes well. Salesforce.com made the announcement at Dreamforce 2010, being held in San Francisco through Thursday.

Oracle announced Tuesday that it will acquire ATG -- a provider of e-commerce applications and platforms -- for $6.00 per share, or approximately $1 billion in cash. Oracle and ATG both pointed to the complementary nature of their applications. ATG provides an e-commerce platform that includes a cross-channel blend of online, in-store and mobile applications.

The insane tug-of-war between Dell and HP for enterprise storage company 3Par has finally drawn to a close. We have a winner, if you want to call it that -- the final sale price is more than double the figure Dell initially put forward when it announced its intentions to buy 3Par a couple weeks ago, so who knows how much of that is real value and how much is just financial one-upsmanship.

HP has won the bidding war it waged with Dell for data-storage company 3Par, whose shares were trading at $9.65 when Dell first tried to acquire it in mid-August. Dell decided not to match HP's $2.4 billion ($33 per share) offer, which topped Dell's bid of $32 per share. Dell first tried to acquire 3Par with an $18 per share offer on August 16, which 3Par initially accepted.