Oracle's cloud acquisition machine is revving up again after a few months of dormancy, and it's headed in a vertical direction. Last week, the company paid $662 million for Textura, which provides contract and payment services for construction companies, and just a few days later is plunking down $532 million for Opower, which sells a big data analysis platform to utilities:
Opower's solutions enable over 100 global utilities, such as PG&E, Exelon and National Grid, to deliver a modern digital customer experience. Opower's big data platform stores and analyzes over 600 billion meter reads from 60 million utility end customers, enabling utilities to proactively meet regulatory requirements, decrease the cost to serve, and improve customer satisfaction.
Oracle plans to fold Opower's platform under its Oracle Utilities line of business, but the technology really ties into its broader push around DaaS (data as a service), says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
"This acquisition brings together two synergistic areas: Opower's big data base meter and consumer data with Oracle's CRM and DaaS capabilities," Mueller says. "Oracle will have more consumer data than anyone, making it more strategic for utilities as a partner. Today, utilities have to integrate consumption and CRM data, and now they can get this from Oracle in one stop. In an industry wary of integration issues, that's a key value."
There's a lot of potential in leveraging utility and consumer data, Mueller adds. For example, a customer's electricity usage profile can help companies know when someone is at home at possibly more receptive to a sales offer for other products and services.
Meanwhile, Textura's capabilities will be aligned with Oracle's Primavera software suite for construction project management:
Textura's cloud services process $3.4 billion in payments for over 6,000 projects each month, helping keep projects on time and under budget while reducing risk for developers, contractors and subcontractors. Textura offers its cloud services in a consumption model preferred by the engineering and construction industry whereby the companies involved pay based on project activity. Further, usage of Textura's cloud services creates a network effect that benefits all participants as more than 85,000 general and subcontractors are connected to the platform.
"The issue is that architecture, engineering and construction has always been a poorly served market [for software], and when a large player like Oracle comes in, the industry is hopeful there's going to be more investment," says Constellation Research founder R "Ray" Wang.
A common model for construction project delivery is DBOM (design, build, operate and maintain). "The subcontractor process is getting crazier because of regulation and specialization," so aligning Textura with Primavera makes sense for Oracle, Wang says.
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