As Oracle Corp. begins to integrate itself with Cerner Corp.after buying it for $28.3 billion, it may see value in data center investments around the Kansas City metro, both by Cerner and other entities.
Cerner (Nasdaq: CERN), owns two local data centers: at its world headquarters in North Kansas City andLee's Summit Integration Campus. It's unknown whether those properties will remain local priorities for Oracle. The Texas-based tech company outlined plans Monday to modernize Cerner's systems and move them to its Oracle Cloud.
"This can be done very quickly because Cerner’s largest business and most important clinical system already runs on the Oracle Database,"Mike Sicilia, Oracle's (NYSE: ORCL) executive vice president for vertical industries, said in the merger announcement. "No change required there. What will change is the user interface."
There is a possible bellwether for the future of Cerner's area data centers. The company kept operating the facilities after striking a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. as its preferred cloud provider.Announced in 2019, that agreement last year was framed by Cerner as part of a strategic shift from being an EHR-centric company to a digital platform organization.
The fate of the Cerner-AWS partnership now is unclear.Larry Ellison, the company's chairman and chief technology officer, has habitually taken shots at AWS, including on cost, security and outages, in quarterly earnings calls.
Although he's optimistic about Oracle's prospects for long-term growth in Kansas City, Kansas City Area Development Council CEOTim Cowdensaid it's too early to do more than speculate about the company's plans.
"However, Oracle's acquisition of Cerner definitely gives Kansas City an opportunity to highlight its rich tech + data center strengths to a global tech enterprise," he said in a statement.
"As the most-connected region in the U.S. with 5.5 million miles of fiber, affordable and reliable energy, and a robust talent pool with 1 in 10 Kansas Citians working in tech, we're also an emerging data center market. In addition, the market is proactively developing the 'next iteration' of data centers — hyper scale — which includes recently disclosed plans at the Hunt Midwest Business Park and Golden Plains Technology Park," he wrote.
If Oracle opts to bolster its fast-growing global data center network —now in 36 regions and counting — the Kansas City region presents no shortage of options.
In south Kansas City, two of the 11 remaining phases of Cerner's Innovations Campus call for 120,000-square-foot data centers. With the transfer of Cerner's approved incentives package, Oracle could tap up to $33.8 million in public dollars for those phases, from city and state tax increment financing and economic activity tax revenues, if it activated the requisite project areas by Oct. 10, 2023.
In the Northland,$8.2 billion in incentives approved earlier this year for the 766-acre Golden Plains Technology Park may pique Oracle's interest. Preliminary park plans have depicted 16 data center buildings totaling 5.5 million square feet of construction.The first phase of construction has seen $517.5 million in building permit activity this month under Velvet Tech Services LLC.