Oracle rolled out of bed Thursday morning and said it's going to buy Taleo and its talent management cloud widgetry for $46 a share or roughly $1.9 billion net of Taleo's cash and debt.

That's an 18% premium. Not bad for a company that was originally bootstrapped.

Taleo (say Ta-LAY-oh) competes with SuccessFactors, which SAP is buying for $3.4 billion, and its stock price fattened up after the SuccessFactors deal was announced in December on speculation it would be taken out by Oracle.

Taleo is supposed to handle more SaaS transactions than anybody except Salesforce.com.

TechCrunch reported back in December that Taleo had a hand in 15% of US hires last year or 3.1 million people, saw 50 million-60 million folks visit its jobs listing sites and counted half the Fortune 100 among its 5,000 customers.

Presumably - hopefully - Oracle figures unemployment numbers are going to drop.

Taleo's been in business for going on 13 years and recently started adapting to the trendy social and mobile metaphor for matching candidates to recruiters. It's also supposed to be handy with helping companies with retention, career management and promotions.

Oracle said it would add Taleo's Talent Management Cloud to the Oracle Public Cloud and create a comprehensive cloud offering for HR. It expects the deal to close mid-year.

Taleo should do about $325 million this year, up ~20%.

It's kinda déjà vu for Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire. He ran PeopleSoft's global services, responsible for most of its $2.7 billion in revenue, when Oracle insisted on buying the joint.

He joined Taleo and took it public in 2005. AllThingsDigital remembers it being the second cloud-based software company after Salesforce to go public.

Taleo is tight with Workday, the on-demand financial and human capital management company PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield started after PeopleSoft went to Oracle, partnering with it on deals. SAP and SuccessFactors mean to compete with Workday.

Taleo was on course to expand internationally, particularly Europe, SaaS being a lot cheaper than perpetual licenses. Oracle should broaden its horizons a lot faster.