This Man Is Now Running A Huge New Business Unit At Oracle

Oracle has completed the acquisition of big hospitality tech company Micros Systems, a deal valued at $5.3 billion when it was announced in June.

Micros actually cost Oracle $4.6 billion net of Micros' cash. Even so, this is Oracle's biggest acquisition since it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion (which really cost Oracle $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash.)

And in July, Oracle authorized up to $10 billion in bonds to help pay for Micros - and perhaps, other acquisitions.

Micros means two things to Oracle. Helping Oracle find a new source to boost revenue, which has grown roughly 3% over its last two fiscal years (from $37.1 billion in 2012, to $38.3 billion in 2014). Micros expects to end the year at over $1.36 billion in revenue and it grew revenues in 2014, so far, about 7%.

Oracle also wants Micros to help it fend off competitors like SAP and Salesforce.com who want to lure hospitality companies away from Oracle and onto their clouds instead.

Oracle has a master plan: it wants to own various industries that are going through radical technology changes. Retail, for instance, is an industry that is playing with everything from tablets on the sales floor, to RFID chips to tag merchandise, to iBeacons and near-field communications to offer in-store services.

Micros is in the hospitality industry (restaurants, hotels, resorts), that are also starting to do imaginative things with tech, from customer loyalty apps, to cloud-based restaurant management.

That's why Oracle added Micros and its 6,000 employees Mike Webster's plate.

Webster is the exec running Oracle's retail division. He now becomes the Senior Vice President and GM of the new combined business unit: Oracle Retail and Hospitality.

Oracle doesn't break out the revenues of the retail unit, but in 2012, a year after Webster joined Oracle, retail was Oracle's third-largest vertical business unit, reported Retail Systems Research.

Webster has been with Oracle since 2011, coming from NCR. This is a huge vote of confidence for him.

As to Oracle's bigger plan. It thinks there are four buckets of opportunity that can be applied to several big industries: Mobile/social, big data, cloud and Internet of Things.

Oracle wants to bring these technologies to industries like health care, telecom/communications, utilities and so on.