Oracle’s latest acquisition is Skire, a provider of specialized cloud based software for capital and facilities management. The platform caters to a fairly broad range of industries and supports further customization with templates that can be developed in-house according to the firm’s website. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Oracle is upping its cloud play now that competitors like SAP are making aggressive advancements in this field, also via acquisitions among other things. But the data base giant has been doing its best to avoid lagging behind the rest – Skire is Oracle’s fifth acquisition this year, and will be integrated into its Primavera product family. That’s a also a company that the vendor acquired in 2008.

“It’s another step by Oracle in filling out its software-as-a-service offerings,” writes AllThingsD. “The big one this year, of course, was Taleo, a SaaS-based human capital management application, which it grabbed for $1.9 billion. The other big one in recent memory was RightNow, which it acquired for $1.4 billion last October.”

Oracle has been particularly active in the M&A festivities during the past couple of months. Just over a week ago it acquired Involver, a provider of social media management software. Terms of this deal weren’t disclosed either.

The Involver move was preceded by the buyout of Collective Intelligence, another firm that develops social media solutions.  The two are very similar, although the latter puts a bigger emphasis on analytics – another area in which Oracle has some catching up to do.

Big data is an industry that’s picking up momentum fast, and it’s steadily converging with the cloud space as it matures. Just this week a company called Loggly raised nearly $6 million for a web-based solution that aggregates and analyzed application performance.