16. Oracle Buys NetSuite For $9.3 Billion

Given that Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison was a major shareholder in NetSuite, Oracle's deal in July to acquire the cloud ERP, CRM and ecommerce application vendor was not entirely unexpected.

Nevertheless, the $9.3 billion acquisition, which was completed Dec. 7, was a major development in the volatile cloud applications arena where Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and others are battling it out.

Oracle has vowed to continue offering NetSuite's applications "forever" (according to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd), targeting them toward SMB customers and co-existing with Oracle's enterprise-class cloud applications.