Oracle continues to push forward with its acquisition spree while at the same time pursuing the company's cloud journey. But unfortunately for Oracle, the company seems way behind its rivals when it comes to the cloud evolution. The company needs to address this challenge head on and not delay, as it did for so many years in the server virtualization market.
To help address this cloud gap, Oracle recently, yet quietly, announced the acquisition of Nimbula, a cloud software startup launched back in 2010 by some of the original builders of Amazon's public cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS): Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon.
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Details on the acquisition are still sparse, but in the official announcement, Oracle stated:
[Oracle] has agreed to acquire Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. Nimbula's technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality, and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments. Nimbula's product is complementary to Oracle and is expected to be integrated with Oracle's cloud offerings.
Nimbula Director, the company's flagship product, is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) software solution for building self-service public, private, and hybrid clouds. Current Nimbula customers use Director to aid in software development and testing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosting, batch processing, Hadoop deployments, and other general-purpose cloud-related functionalities.
The company's secret sauce is contained within its Nimbula Director engine, which is positioned as a "cloud operating system." According to the company, one of its claims to fame is that if given three bare-metal x86 servers, a dedicated network, and the Nimbula Director ISO, a company can deliver its own complete Amazon EC2-style cloud.
But since the company's introduction into the cloud market, there has been some question as to the strength of Nimbula's market penetration. In an effort to help push things along, the company decided in 2012 to officially join the OpenStack development community and the OpenStack Foundation with the goals of transforming Nimbula Director into the most enterprise-ready, scalable, reliable, and flexible OpenStack distribution, while at the same time contributing meaningfully back to the project and the community.