Oracle plays cloud catchup with purchase of BigMachines

When it comes to cloud services, Oracle is majorly behind companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce — so rather than build most competing technologies in-house, the company has scooped up a bevy of cloud companies over the last two years.

Its latest acquisition is BigMachines, the cloud-based CPQ (configure, price, and quote) provider, Oracle announced Wednesday morning. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it is expected to close this year.

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BigMachines’ CPQ cloud automates sales orders to help salespeople assemble and price complex orders. Oracle plans to integrate the software with its cloud-based marketing, sales, and service products.

With the BigMachines’ acquisition, Oracle’s offerings will increasingly overlap with those from CRM heavyweight Salesforce.com.

“I think it’s part of Oracle catching up in [software-as-a-service] and the cloud, especially with a company like Salesforce,” Godard Abel, co-founder and former CEO of BigMachines, told VentureBeat. “I think Oracle is now recognizing the cloud and [software-as-a-service] are very important, and they’re kind of late to that, so now they’re acquiring a lot of the category leaders to try to catch up.”

Oracle was already working on cloud-based CPQ software, according to an FAQ document, but the BigMachines acquisition will help “accelerate” CPQ functionality in its Sales Cloud. BigMachines’ flagship product is based on Oracle and Java, while the lower-end one, BigMachines Express, is built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform.

Founded in 2000, Deerfield, IL-based BigMachines has about 275 customers, including Coca-Cola, ADP, HP, and Symantec. Abel left the company July 2012 to start G2 Crowd, which he described as Yelp for enterprise software.

Oracle’s other recent cloud acquisitions include Nimbula (March 2013), a cloud compute company that offered private cloud deployment, and DataRaker (December 2012), a cloud-based analytics platform.