On December 17, Oracle announced that the company is buying electronic medical records company Cerner for $28.3 billion. This deal is the biggest acquisition that Oracle has made ever, in the company's history. Oracle is an enterprise software giant, which is based in Austin, TX. As of December 20, Oracle had a market cap of $264 billion. Cerner is known as a supplier of Health IT services. The company is based in Kansas City, MO. Furthermore, Oracle is trying to move into the healthcare sector with the Cerner acquisition like Microsoft did. Microsoft did acquire Nuance Communications for $20 billion in April 2021. Nuance Communications is a speech recognition software company, which is based in Boston, MA. Salesforce is another huge software provider, that could make a push into the healthcare industry with a similar type of acquisition. Salesforce; Oracle; and Microsoft do compete in enterprise software for databases; customer relationship management; and in cloud computing. In addition, mergers and acquisitions topped $5 trillion for the first time ever in 2021. Mergers and acquisition activity was led by technology and health care, according to a report from Reuters. Back to Oracle, the company's stock price did drop by 4.87 points at the close of day after the merger news was announced. In contrast, Cerner's stock price went up by 0.72 points on December 20. Oracle's stock symbol is ORCL on new york stock exchange, and Cerner's stock symbol is CERN on the nasdaq stock exchange. In other business related news, the omicron variant of Covid-19 has brought the major stock exchanges to fluctuate in a negative direction. Stocks sold off today, and in recent days last week due to Omicron fears. The omicron variant is aggressively spreading into various parts of the world during the fall and winter seasons. From the Omicron fears, there is uncertainty of the variant bringing economic shutdown around the world. Some stocks like Zoom video and Netflix did rise, while most stocks did drop today in the three major stock indices. In closing, Oracle believes that their acquisition of Cerner will help the company push into the health cloud sector. This acquisition should give Oracle an advantage, and bring more healthcare clients to its cloud platform. Cerner's largest business and most important clinical system already runs on the Oracle database. Oracle sees this merger closing, or taking effect in the first three to six months of 2022. See the picture above of Cerner's company building. Good day!
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