Before Sun: Oracle's recent acquisitions

Oracle hasn't been shy in recent years about snapping up other companies, including big-name outfits such as BEA Systems, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems.

Here's a quick rundown of Oracle's most recent deals, prior to the proposed US$7.4 billion Sun Microsystems buyout announced Monday (and here you can view our slideshow on 2009's hottest tech M&A deals):

-- Relsys International: Oracle announced on March 23 that it would acquire this maker of drug safety, risk management and analytics applications for the health sciences industry. The move helps improve Oracle's position in respect to big computing changes expected in the U.S. healthcare system under the Obama administration.

-- mValent: Oracle announced on Feb. 4, 2009, plans to buy this maker of application configuration management for an undisclosed sum. "It means that Oracle is getting more serious about application management -- as they should after buying so many application platforms, even if they mush all of them together with Fusion, customers are still going to have to manage the end-to-end performance of the process or transaction," said Jasmine Noel, founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates, following announcement of the deal. The move is seen as part of a broader desire on Oracle's part of beef up its management product portfolio, with some speculating that Oracle might even be an eventual bidder for a much larger management software company such as BMC or CA.  

-- Tacit Software: Oracle snapped up the intellectual property assets of this maker of expertise location tools that can be integrated with Oracle's Beehive collaboration software.   

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