Oracle Acquires GoldenGate Software

Oracle announced a new acquisition yesterday, having bought GoldenGate Software for an undisclosed sum. The software giant is already going through one major deal, being in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems for a $7.4 billion, but this latest one is on a much smaller scale, with GoldenGate having earned around $100 million last year.

While not a very large company yet, GoldenGate makes some very interesting products, which Oracle is lacking at the moment, focused on real-time integration. The software provides data centers with fast, real-time transactions between separate operations moving data to a central location as it comes in. Typically these types of transactions are scheduled to take place once a day or even less frequently. Lately this has become an issue for some customers who need to make decisions based on the data coming from several systems.

“The need to improve operating performance in a global 24x7 environment has led to the need for data integration to support real-time and high availability capabilities,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Development. “With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information.”

Both companies declined to disclose the financial details but, based on the going rate for similar venture capital-backed companies that are getting acquired for about two to three times their revenue lately, Oracle paid upwards of $200 million for GoldenGate. Meanwhile, the company's much more touted acquisition, Sun Microsystems, is going ahead as planned, with Sun shareholders voting this week and agreeing to the deal. The move will solidify Oracle's position in the database market, especially by acquiring the open-source database management system MySQL, but it also provides the company with several other key technologies.