Oracle Looks Deeper into the Cloud
Oracle Looks Deeper into the Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
Last week, Oracle announced the acquisition of Mountain View, California-based Nimbula, echoing the increase in cloud adoption within the channel. Nimbula is a cloud operating system company specializing in infrastructure-as-a-service software for the development of private, hybrid, or public clouds, and was co-founded by Chris Pinkham and others involved in the creation of Amazon’s EC2 service.
The principal at sales consultancy ZS Associates, John DeSarbo, said: “These are interesting times, it seems like each week we hear of another deal related to cloud services, and the channel needs to figure out which manufacturers are going to position themselves as service providers and which are going to position themselves as suppliers to service providers.”
Nimbula Director is a flagship product aiding software development and testing, SaaS hosting, batch processing, Hadoop deployments and related functionalities. To strengthen its market penetration, Nimbula joined the OpenStack community last year.
The COO of Bellevue, Washington-based Explore Consulting, Jeremy DeSpain, said: “Oracle is a longtime player in the software space, and I think they are selling their commitment to cloud more than ever by investing in a lot of these SaaS and cloud-based software companies. And this announcement shows them moving into the backend infrastructure component. The market is clearly strong. Our phones are ringing off the hook from folks saying can you please manage my data for me?”
A prepared statement from Oracle noted: “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. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013.”
However, one channel partner does cast doubt on whether or not the private cloud alternative has strong business potential in the long term.
The president of North Hollywood, California-based channel partner SADA Systems, Tony Safoian, stated: “The cloud sector is super-hot right now. So people are making a lot of acquisitions aimed at solidifying their position as key players. We're big proponents of public cloud. We think the private cloud is a stopgap for the medium-term of maybe 10 to 15 years. But, we are much more interested in developing services and technologies in the public cloud because that's where we ultimately think things are going. When it comes to the cloud, Oracle is way behind in the cloud evolution.”
No further information about the acquisition has been noted, but it is accepted that the logical development of the company’s public hosted cloud service is that the technology will be integrated into the Oracle Private Cloud program. Therefore, it will be possible for customers to decide on which cloud they wish to use to store their data, and, if needed, will strengthen the public cloud for backup and disaster recovery.
The CEO of Westborough, Massachusetts-based Cumulus Global cloud integrator, Allen Falcon, said: “Consolidation and increased competition are to be expected at this point in the maturing cycle, so this comes as no surprise. There's not much you can do to navigate around it from a channel point of view. We just have to wait and see what they do with the product lines and make decisions based on what is good for the customer base. We always need to have a plan B in place and, if possible, a plan C.” (CY) Link