Business software maker SAP announced its latest multi-billion dollar deal today: the acquisition of Ariba.

SAP has agreed to pay $45 per share, a 20 percent premium over ARBA’s closing price on May 21. The merger will have to go through the regular round of regulations before becoming official, and experts believe that the transaction will finalize sometime around the end of August.

Ariba offers hosted collaboration commerce solutions for the enterprise, and maintains a network of over 730,000 suppliers. It also has an equally impressive clientele, and all in all the acquisition will most likely prove to be a much-needed big boost to SAP’s cloud lineup.

“”We don’t have the DNA in the cloud,” SAP co-Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott said in an interview. “We’re probably the most strategic cloud player in the enterprise software industry.”

The BI giant is in fact on a race to build up a competitive cloud portfolio, and one of its biggest rivals is Oracle. Today the database kingpin made an acquisition of its own, buying social media marketer Virtue for a more modest yet still formidable sum of $300 million with a similar agenda of stepping up its act and better compete against the likes of SAP and Thismoment.  The latter sells a platform that brings together services similar to what Ariba and Virtue are offering under one pane of glass.

This is not the first time that Larry Ellison’s IT behemoth decided to counter its German competitor. Shortly after SAP bought SuccessFactors for over $3 billion,  a deal that went through only in February,  Oracle signed an agreement to pay $46 per share for Taleo, a firm that also provides cloud-based human resource management software.