Over the last year, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL, Mkt Cap: $155.5B) has acquired a number of both public and private companies to boost its product offerings in areas from sales and marketing automation to virtual networking. But an in-depth look at Oracle’s history of partnerships, investments and acquisitions offers strategic insight into the firm’s recent move into a less obvious area: digital health.
While Oracle offers a wide range of healthcare solutions from care collaboration to patient data management, their Business Social Graph reveals a number of strategic digital health acquisitions and investments more specifically aimed at boosting its clinical trial solutions. These strategic moves are in line with previous comments by Oracle on the need to address “the increasing globalization of clinical trails” and a greater integration of software used before and after clinical products hit the market.
Below is Oracle’s Business Social Graph of investments, partnerships and acquisitions since 2009. Interestingly, the chart reveals that the company is less keen on investing in private companies than acquiring them.
Upon closer inspection, Oracle has made three acquisitions and one strategic investment since 2009 related to its clinical trail solutions including the $685 million acquisition of Phase Forward. Their lone strategic investment was in patient monitoring company Proteus Digital Health.
As previously mentioned, Oracle’s investment of resources into clinical trial solutions fits into its stated strategy in the area. In partnering with and investing in Proteus, Oracle gains access to drug monitoring technology for use in clinical trials as well as a number of globalized partnerships, highlighted in the business social graph image below. Meanwhile, Phase Forward’s Clinical Research Suite provides software to manage clinical safety and development processes from Phase 1 clinical trials through monitoring at the post-marketing phase. Oracle’s acquisition of Relsys also boosts its software monitoring solutions in post-marketing studies of clinical trials.
Given Oracle’s recent history of boosting its clinical trial solutions through acquisition and investment, we also have identified five private clinical trial software companies which we expect may may eventually find themselves in Oracle’s crosshairs. A full list of potential Oracle M&A targets can be found on the ‘Research’ tab, after logging in to CB Insights. (Note: The list of companies is only available to CB Insights paid subscribers with access to CB Insider.)
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