5 things to know about Oracle after $28.3 billion acquisition of Kansas City’s Cerner
Tech giant Oracle on Monday announced it’s reached an agreement to acquire Cerner Corp., the largest private employer in the Kansas City area. The deal is worth $28.3 billion, making it one of the largest acquisitions of the year.
Some history
Oracle was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, computer programmers at electronic firm Ampex. The trio debuted a new database management system that “defied the prevailing wisdom that technology would never scale to support large amounts of data or large numbers of users,” according to the Silicon Valley Historical Association. The company grew quickly as it implemented new software services used by scores of businesses. It went public in 1986 and has been aggressive at acquiring other technology companies, including PeopleSoft, a human resources software application; operating system Solaris and computer programming language Java.
Why they want Cerner
Oracle, like many other tech giants, has shown a growing interest in expanding into the world of healthcare. On an earnings call with investors earlier this month, Ellison, now chairman of the board, identified banking and healthcare industries as major focuses of the company moving forward, “and we are doing extremely well in those industries,” he said. On the call, Ellison cited recent success winning over major healthcare clients like Kaiser and the Cleveland Clinic. Analysts say many of the nation’s big technology firms see huge potential in the healthcare industry, where they can get paid to store medical records in the cloud, access huge stores of health data and create new tools for patients and providers. Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all doubled down on healthcare ventures.
The money
Oracle ranks No. 80 on the Fortune 500 list of the nation’s most profitable firms. In June, the company announced its fiscal year 2021 total revenues were up 4% year-over-year to $40.5 billion. The company’s profit increased 9% to $15.2 billion last fiscal year. Analysts value Oracle’s business at more than $280 billion. By comparison, Cerner is valued at about $23 billion. Cerner is ranked No. 480 on the Fortune 500.
Employees
Oracle says it employs 133,000 people around the globe. That includes 13,000 customer support specialists who speak 29 languages and 18,000 implementation consultants. By comparison, Google reportedly employs about 135,000 people. Kansas City’s Cerner employs about 28,000 employees across the globe, including some 13,000 in the Kansas City area. Locally, its workforce is topped only by the federal government and Children’s Mercy hospital, according to the Kansas City Economic Development Corporation. The region’s next largest private employer is Honeywell with about 5,000 workers. Cerner’s global headquarters are off of Missouri 291 in North Kansas City with a substantial campus off Bannister Road in south Kansas City.
A big move
Last December, Oracle made major news as it became the latest tech firm to announce it would leave California. The company moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. But Oracle said most employees would have flexibility in choosing their office location or working remotely. The company noted that it has major hubs around the world, including in Seattle, Denver, Burlington and Orlando. “And we expect to add other locations over time,” Oracle told CNBC. “By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees’ quality of life and quality of output.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2021 at 12:12 PM.
