Whos next on Oracles hit list?

Today, Oracle dropped $1.5 billion to buy RightNow Technologies( s RNOW) to help fill out its newly announced public cloudvision. Last week it bought privately-held Endeca to bolster its big data push.

Having spent more than $70 billion on 40 purchasesin the last few years, Oracle co-president Safra Catz said earlier this month that the company would throttle back on big acquisitions. But, Oracle bought two companies after that and no one else expects the buying behavior to stop.

Oracle certainly has the financial wherewithal to buy what it needs: As of its most-recently-closed quarter, Oracle had $31.66 billion in cash. Oracle stock is doing well, closing today at $32.87, having recovered from a mid-August swoon to below $25.

So, as Oracle wants to fill out in its cloud strategy and/or tickoff other boxes on its to-do list, here are some potential acquisitions that make sense.

1: NetSuiteMore SaaS smarts

Since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already owns a big chunk of NetSuite, some think this is a no-brainer. NetSuite was built from the ground up as a SaaS provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that runs on Oracle infrastructure, which also makes it a nice fit. While, some say Ellisons partial ownership of NetSuite would be problema! tic, Ora cle has bought Ellison-staked companies in the pastmost recently acquiring Pillar Data in June.

NetSuites target audience tends to be smaller companies than those Oracle typically takes on, but some observers think to keep up its growth, Oracle has to get more aggressive in that market.

RightNow made sense because Oracle and Larry Ellison is fixated on Salesforce.com and will do anything to disrupt them, said one Wall Street analyst who did not want to be named. NetSuite could have a similar impact.

2: BMC SoftwareManagement, management, management

With a market cap of about $7 billion, BMC would be another big-ticket buy for Oracle. But then again BMC could help Oracle bridge the management divide between on-premises software and the various cloud deployment models, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst for Interarbor Research.

With BMC aboard, Oracle could also fend off charges that its building a big Oracle-only hardware-software vault for its customers. The Redwood Shores, Calif. company is getting increasingly sensitive to charges that it wants to lock customers in and BMC could help it show that it will continue to offer interoperabilitywith non-Oracle systems.

3: InformaticaBetter, cleaner data

Some think Informatica long rumored to be in Oracles crosshairs, is still a viable target. Informatica would bring with it data integration and ETL (extract/transform/load) expertise. ETL technologies are used to funnel data in from diverse sources, put it into a format useable for the application at hand, and load it (typically) into data warehouses.

But one Wall Street watcher said if that deal made sense it would have been done by now. And it would not be trivial: Informatica has a market cap of about $4.77 billion.

4: Tibco SoftwareMore middlewa! re, SOA smarts

TIBCO Software Inc., also leaps to mind as a possible fit for Oraclenot only because of its strength in middleware and Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology, but for its cloud application platform called Silver.Tibcoalso boasts some pretty impressive financial services customers and reportedly rejected a Hewlett-Packard buyout bid last yearsomething that might intrigue Oracle.

There would also be technology overlap there, but given Oracles explosive growth into new markets, there are not potential acquisitions that would not include some overlap. People also forget that Oracle ended up paying well over $7 billion forPeopleSofts HRM smartswhile already fielding its own HRM software. Overlap does not seem to be an issue for Oracle.

5: Engine YardHipper tool selection

Oracle has a ton of Java expertise by virtue of its buyouts of Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems. But if it wants to woo web-age developers, it needs to do more with the languages popular for that crowd.

What about Perl, Python, Groovyall those scripting languages? Salesforce.com bought Heroku, Oracle needs to do something there, said Gardner. A company like Engine Yard would be an interesting fit and could attract these fast, young developers that might think of Oracle as a boring enterprise software company, he said.

Engine Yard started out as a Ruby-on-Rails oriented PaaSbut this summer acquired PHP PaaS startupOrchestrato broaden its reach.

Some of these aforementioned deals would be quite pricey but that probably doesnt matter given Oracles cash trove. Oracle can buy wh! oever an d whatever it wants, said Jeff Matthews, managing partner of RAM Partners, PLC, a Greenwich, Conn. investment firm.

Photo courtesy ofFlickr userChika

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.