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Even though competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell are now putting the kibosh on doing acquisitions, Oracle keeps forging ahead with that strategy.
The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company filled another gap in its product and services line by acquiring Nimbula, a respected provider of private cloud infrastructure management software.
Each of the Tier 1 all-purpose IT hardware, software and services companies now has some sort of cloud-management software/services division in place. This is now mandatory to handle the increasing number of on-demand, cloud-dependent service-level agreements that are being sought by companies in all sectors of business.
Nimbula’s IT gives companies the ability to manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments.
‘Complementary’ to Oracle’s Product Lineup
In the announcement, Oracle said Nimbula’s product is complementary to its current offerings. Nimbula, built upon open-source code, undoubtedly will find a home somewhere in the Oracle Cloud division. The transaction, the details of which were not released by Oracle, is expected to close in the first half of 2013.
Nimbula was co-founded by an expert in this field: one of the primary Amazon Web Services architects, Chris Pinkham. Willem van Biljon is the other co-founder.
Nimbula’s secret sauce is contained in its open-source-based Nimbula Director engine, which it positions as a “cloud operating system.” This software packs loads of functionality into a single console that manages the functions of a public cloud, including provisioning, change management, tracking and chargeback (to various departments inside an enterprise) of cloud workloads.
Forward-Looking Company
Nimbula, based in Mountain View, Calif., is a forward-looking company. Last year in eWEEK, Jay Judkowitz, director of product management at Nimbula, predicted that open source would win more and more infrastructure deals in 2013.
“For greenfield infrastructure projects—particularly public cloud, private cloud, infrastructure for software as a service [SaaS] hosting and big data farms—we should expect open-source software or open-source-compatible software to win the bulk of the deals,” an eWEEK slide show quoted Judkowitz as saying. “Proprietary infrastructure will not disappear in 2013, but it will have a great deal of trouble gaining new ground and winning new projects.”
It’s still early, but off the top from what eWEEK has seen thus far, Judkowitz is pretty much on target.