Oracle Buys Skire Assets For Cloud Foothold

Oracle announced Thursday that it has an agreement to acquire the assets of Skire, a provider of capital program management and facilities management applications that will give Oracle another foothold into the cloud.

Skire offers both on-premises software and cloud services, but on-demand services are what's lacking in the Oracle Primavera portfolio into which the Skire assets will be combined. Oracle said the combination will create a "full-lifecycle" enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) platform that addresses everything from capital planning and construction projects to operations and maintenance for owners, operators, contractors, and subcontractors.

"Adding Skire to the Oracle Primavera suite will help our customers gain complete visibility, automation, and financial control across their entire project and program portfolio," said Mike Sicilia, senior VP and general manager of Oracle Primavera, in a statement.

Oracle acquired Primavera in 2008 to bolster its project management capabilities for manufacturing, engineering, and construction, and, in particular, the aerospace, defense, utilities, and oil and gas industries. Primavera was a leading provider of software and remains so under Oracle, but competitors such as Clarizen, Daptive, and AtTask have grown their cloud-based services.

[ Want more on Oracle's cloud plans? Read Oracle Cloud Apps Unleashed: The Good, Bad, And Ugly. ]

Cloud-based EPPM will add yet another application to the long list where Oracle now offers both on-premises and cloud-based alternatives. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison formally announced the company's cloud infrastructure and cloud applications portfolio in June, boasting of $1 billion in revenue and more than 100 applications on day one. Competitors raised plenty of questions about those claims.

Oracle's cloud-based applications portfolio includes Oracle Fusion Applications and (all acquired within the last year) RightNow CRM, Taleo human capital management, and, in the most recent acquisitions before Thursday's Skire deal, Vitrue, Collective Intellect, and Involver social media services.

The terms of the Skire deal were not disclosed.