AST Creates Oracle Super Systems Integrator With Serene Acquisition

AST Corp. has in one fell swoop built an Oracle services global powerhouse with its acquisition of Serene Corp.

The deal provides the Chicago based AST, the winner of Oracle's Partner of the Year award three times in the last five years, with an Oracle Gold level cloud leader with cloud muscle, international reach and offshoring capabilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"This creates one of the most dominant privately held Oracle services company in the world that is not private equity backed," said Martin Wolf, president of Martin Wolf M&A Advisors, Walnut Creek, Calif., which was an advisor to AST on the deal. "This means they can go head to head against the Accentures, KPMGs and Deloittes. With Serene, AST is going to punch well above its weight class. They are now like a welter-weight that hits like a heavyweight."

[Related: Oracle Q1 '16: Investment In Cloud Apps Is About To Really Pay Off]

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The Santa Clara, Calif. based Serene is one of the top Oracle CRM and data management leadres with 125 Oracle SaaS based Customer Experience and Master Data Mnagement projects under its belt.

AST CEO Pravin Kumar said the deal strengthens the public sector powerhouse's ability to provide multimillion dollar enterprise application projects into a wider array of industries including financial services, engineering and construction, high technology and health sciences.

The AST Serene deal comes in the midst of a record number of mergers and acquisitions in the channel as companies beef up to tackle the cloud services opportunity.

Earlier this week, Accenture stepped up its cloud game by acquiring Cloud Sherpas, one of fastest growing and most respected cloud solution providers in the world.

The deal provides $30 billion Accenture, an outsourcing giant that was No. 2 on the 2015 CRN SP500, with the largest Salesforce.com and Google cloud applications provider in the world. Cloud Sherpas was No. 3 on CRN's 2015 Fast Growth list with a 289 percent two year growth rate.