Oracle Gobbles Up SPL, Stellent In Shopping Spree

Financial terms of the SPL deal were not disclosed. Oracle's Stellent buy is its most expensive acquisition since Siebel Systems, acquired earlier this year for nearly $6 billion. Oracle will pay $13.50 per share in cash for Stellent, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., through a tender offer. Expected to close by early 2007, the acquisition will give Oracle a line of enterprise content management (ECM) applications used by 4,700 organizations, including General Motors, Merrill Lynch, Home Depot and U.S. government agencies.

"We didn't see it coming," said Jan Letchman, president of Stellent partner Advanced Data Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla. systems integrator.

Despite his surprise, Letchman is cautiously optimistic about the deal. ADS has a number of clients using Oracle's database as their back end, and those customers are eager to reap the benefits of tighter integration between the two vendors' technologies, he said.

Letchman sees Stellent as a natural, complementary fit with Oracle's products. He hopes, though, that Oracle will play nicely with supporting rival databases like Microsoft's SQL Server, which is also popular with ADS' clients.

Content management is becoming a mergers-and-acquisitions battleground as customers struggle to deal with an expanding tangle of structured and unstructured data and vendors fight for a technical advantage. For example, IBM recently struck a deal to buy ECM vendor FileNet for $1.6 billion. And Stellent's flagship product, Universal Content Management, features a Web-based repository that can track and secure a variety of heterogeneous files, including e-mail, reports, spreadsheets, images and other multimedia content.

Oracle's second acquisition of the week, SPL, is a privately held, San Francisco-based software maker for electric, gas and water companies. SPL's enSUMIT suite includes applications for billing, customer service, mobile workforce management, outage management and business intelligence. SPL has a staff of 750 in offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The deal furthers Oracle's strategy of picking up companies with vertical expertise in industries it would like to dominate, akin to what it did in the retail sector by buying Retek.

Although Oracle didn't disclose the terms of the SPL deal, it's also a sizable acquisition. Purchased in 2004 by private equity investor GFI Energy Ventures, SPL last disclosed its annual sales in 2002, when it generated $111 million in revenue for the year. Stellent had revenue of $123.4 million in its most recent fiscal year, which ended in March.