Will Oracle Acquire CSC?
Will Larry Ellison pull out his wallet yet again to make another large acquisition? Does Oracle have CSC in its sights? Tips suggest that this may be the case and that Oracle is possibly looking to acquire services giant CSC.
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) provides consulting and IT services to private sector industries as well as government, including systems design and integration, IT and business process outsourcing, applications software, and Web and application hosting and management consulting.
An acquisition of CSC would significantly boost Oracle’s services business and help the company compete with services powerhouses IBM and HP. Acquiring CSC would tack on 95,000 employees with a large established services business serving the public sector, private sector and a growing cloud solutions business.
CSC has a growing cybersecurity business and has made some recent acquisitions itself, including the recent acquisition of Vulnerability Research Labs (VRL), a small privately held cyber threat intelligence firm based in Columbia, Maryland. CSC also recently hired Mark Rasch who is charged with deploying and growing a new cybersecurity and privacy consulting practice for the company.
Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010 for which it paid $7.5 billion. The acquisition of Sun helps Oracle by combining software and hardware systems solutions to customers. Just last week, Oracle announced it would spend $1 billion in cash to acquire e-commerce platform provider ATG.
CSC and Oracle have had a longstanding partnership bringing services and technologies to mutual clients worldwide. CSC is an Oracle Global System Integration partner at the Platinum level in the Oracle Partner Network.
Shares of CSC are currently trading at $47.10 per share giving the company a market value of $7.27 billion. Shares had traded close to $58 per share in early 2010. Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, CSC has current annual revenues of $16.2 billion.
We reached out to both Oracle and CSC for comment. Oracle responded to our inquiry but declined to comment. We haven’t received a response from CSC.
At this point the acquisition talks are purely a rumor but we will continue to investigate.
Update: A representative from CSC did respond, saying “We don’t comment on any speculation such as this.”