Oracle’s $30B Bid to Acquire Cerner to Beef up Healthcare Focus

Software giant Oracle is in discussions to acquire electronic medical records firm Cerner in a potential deal that could be worth $30 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. If the deal closes, it would be the largest acquisition to date for Oracle, which has a market value topping $280 billion.

The move would also give Oracle a larger foothold in the healthcare sector. Cerner develops software to maintain and analyze healthcare records and data.

The second-biggest software company in the world, Oracle already has a considerable presence in the healthcare space, with technology that parses data to boost efficiency and patient outcomes.

See also: Google Health Boss Quits; Named CEO Of Health Tech Company Cerner

Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, Cerner’s estimated market value is $23 billion, with the potential deal expected to boost that to approximately $30 billion. That figure could change since the exact terms of the deal are not known.

Four months ago Cerner hired David Feinberg as its CEO. Feinberg hails from Google, where led the Alphabet team into the healthcare space and partnered with major medical centers to collect and analyze data.

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Now headquartered in Austin, Texas after moving from Silicon Valley last year, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who came to the company in 2019, said she anticipated that the company’s operating margins would meet or exceed pre-pandemic numbers.

Having Cerner on its team would help Oracle shift to the cloud and win more cloud-computing business. Oracle initially dragged its feet on embracing the cloud and fell behind companies like Amazon and Microsoft, which have market values topping $1 trillion, partly due to their cloud units.

Big tech firms have been backing data centers as they compete for a slice of the $214 billion cloud computing pie. In April, Microsoft spent $16 billion to acquire the artificial intelligence company Nuance Communication.