Del Prete said Ellison saw the importance of "migrating to the application layer." That led to a series of back to back software deals, starting with PeopleSoft which Oracle bought for $10 billion in 2005, and Siebel Systems, which it acquired up for $6 billion the following year. The buying spree continued through the Great Recession and beyond when Oracle gobbled up Hyperion for 43.3 billion in 2007, BEA Systems for $8.5 billion in 2008 and NetSuite for $9.3 billion in 2016 In 2010, Oracle made a major move in hardware when it bought server maker Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. Despite the buying spree, some critics argue that Oracle was late to a major trend, the cloud, which let businesses set up businesses on web-based platforms, allowing them to scale down or abandon private data centers. Amazon Web Services, the dominant player in the cloud, has taken direct aim at Oracle's business with its own line of database products.