Even though Oracle Corp. has spent the last couple of years aggressively expanding its lineup of industry-specific software, its latest investment in the effort still comes as a surprise. The company today announced that it’s paying a massive $663 million to acquire a cloud provider called Textura Corp. that sells business automation services for the construction sector.

The Illinois-based outfit’s portfolio covers almost every major aspect of running a large building project, starting from the initial cost estimation stage. Textura enables architects to upload their blueprints to its infrastructure, select the part of the building they’re interested in evaluated and have a price tag generated automatically within a few seconds. From there, the company’s other services can be used to solicit subcontractors, compare rivaling bids to identify the best candidates and then hammer out the necessary agreements with each supplier.

Textura helps automate both the creation of invoices and the billing process itself, as well as a number of additional chores that crop up once construction is already underway. In particular, its aptly-named PerformanceTracker service makes it possible to assess the work of contractors throughout a project’s duration to identify slowdowns that may require attention and find ways to pick up the pace. Like general-purpose reporting software, the application employs graphical dashboards to make the data easily accessible the various parties involved in the undertaking.

Textura claims that its services are used to handle some $3.4 million worth of of work contracts and supplier deals every month for some 6,000 building projects. Oracle plans on integrating the  firm’s services into its Primavera suite of project management tools to better support customers from the construction industry. With rivals IBM Corp. and SAP SE also investing heavily in their respective cloud lineups, such vertical-specific functionality is becoming increasingly important for the company’s differentiation efforts. Plus, it has the potential to open new monetization opportunities that could go a long way towards offsetting the declining demand for its on-premise software.

The acquisition of Textura has already cleared Oracle’s board of directors and is now awaiting approval from the construction specalist’s stakeholders and market regulators. The transaction is expected to complete later this year.

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