Oracle announced Wednesday intent to buy Nimbula, a cloud infrastructure management software company, for an undisclosed amount.
Nimbula's Director platform automates infrastructure management for a variety of use cases, including cloud for testing and development, running data analytics solutions, like Hadoop, in the cloud, hosting infrastructure for Software-as-a-Service providers and operating private and hybrid cloud infrastructure by large organizations.
In 2012, the software company joined OpenStack, an open-source community working on what is becoming the de facto open alternative to proprietary cloud architectures by market incumbents like Amazon.
Oracle has had a fairly wide selection of cloud services and solutions, acting as both a provider and an enabler of cloud. These include a number of Software-as-a-Service offerings, social relationship management, Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and infrastructure products for building and managing private clouds.
The company also offers managed cloud services, where it manages the client's cloud infrastructure for them.
Oracle said Nimbula's product was complementary to its own portfolio and that it was planning to integrate it with its cloud offerings.
Oracle has not been a member of the OpenStack community, and now, if the Nimbula deal is finalized, it will have an in with the open-source project. Many of its competitors, such as HP, IBM, EMC and Dell, have been OpenStack members.
OpenStack has been picking up steam in a big way, with many industry heavyweights introducing solutions services built on the cloud architecture. These include Dell, Cisco, IBM and HP, among others.
Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based hosting company that was one of OpenStack's founding fathers, is transitioning all of its cloud services onto the open-source architecture. HP has built its public cloud infrastructure on OpenStack, and IBM announced last week its intent to use the technology for its cloud offerings.