Oracle to Buy Medical-Records Company Cerner for $28 Billion

Oracle shares fell 2.6%, adding to Friday’s drop of more than 6% after The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was imminent. Oracle has a market value of more than $250 billion.

Oracle, a Silicon Valley veteran that last year moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, is one of the biggest software providers to other companies and organizations.

Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner designs software that hospitals and doctors use to store and analyze medical records and other healthcare data.

Oracle already has a significant presence in healthcare, offering technology meant to help health insurers, healthcare providers and public health systems parse data to increase efficiency and improve patient outcomes.

Buying Cerner could help Oracle with its pivot toward the cloud. Investors have warmed to Oracle as the company ramps up its focus on winning cloud-computing business, after initially being slow to embrace the booming market for storing and analyzing data on remote servers. Oracle has been trying to make up ground in recent years after falling behind companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. , which both now have market values well exceeding $1 trillion thanks in part to thriving cloud units.

A deal for Cerner would easily top Oracle’s next-largest transaction, the roughly $10 billion purchase of enterprise-software firm PeopleSoft Inc. that closed in 2005, followed by a $9 billion deal for cloud-software provider NetSuite Inc. in 2016.

Cerner was advised on the deal by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Centerview Partners.

Write to Dana Cimilluca at [email protected] and Cara Lombardo at [email protected]