Oracle has made some strong boasts about its cloud ambitions, but has yet to produce any real muscle. This acquisition gives Oracle new team members with real insight into what’s happening behind the scenes at OpenStack, as well as a unique tool that can plug into a data center and make any platform ubiquitous, a key advantage for an enterprise company selling a variety of technologies to a diversity of infrastructures.

“The addition of Acme Packet to Oracle’s leading communications portfolio will enable service providers and enterprises to deliver innovative solutions that will change the way we interact, conduct commerce, deliver healthcare, secure our homes, and much more,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd.

Oracle is paying $29.25 per share, a 22 percent premium over Acme’s closing price last Friday. The purchase puts Oracle in the video conferencing and IP business and in direct competition with Cisco communications. Oracle’s offer is more than six times Acme’s sales over the last six months, according to Bloomberg data. The sale is expected to revive slumping sales of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

“Either the total addressable market is on the verge of a huge, transformational inflection point and will quickly balloon into a multi-billion dollar market, or Oracle senses that the future of its business model is in the control of communications data flow, and this acquisition, pricey as it is, is a sure beachhead into a new leg of growth,” Greg Mesniaeff, an analyst at Maxim Group, told Bloomberg.

Acme will help speed the development of cloud computing by providing secure communications across all devices and networks.

“The communications industry is undergoing a dramatic shift as users become more connected and dependent on mobile applications and devices,” Bhaskar Gorti, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Communications, said in the statement. “Service providers and enterprises need a comprehensive communications solution that will enable them to more effectively engage with their customers.”

Last week, Acme reported a $2 million loss on a 15 percent drop in revenue to $70.7 million, topping analysts expectations despite the wane in figures. Acme’s stock has dropped 29 percent over the past year, but managed to improve 37 percent over the last three months due to better than expected sales, the Wall St. Journal reported.

“Together with Oracle, we expect to provide customers with purpose-built, innovative solutions to accelerate the deployment of all-IP networks and help deliver a consistent experience across all services, devices and networks,” said Andy Ory, Chief Executive Officer, Acme Packet.

This is Oracle’s first acquisition for the year. Last year, it acquired 11 companies, the largest of which was a $1.9 billion for Taleo, a human resources cloud software provider. It also purchased customer support software maker RightNow Technologies Inc.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year.

“China is currently our second largest market. I believe it will become our first. I believe strongly that it will,” Cook told the Chinese news agency.

Cook also met with heads of China Mobile to “discuss matters of cooperation,” Reuters reported, a sign that Apple may be working towards a deal with the world’s largest carrier with over 700 million subscribers that would vastly open up the company’s presence in the country. Apple China already has deals Unicom and China Telecom to sell its iPhones in China, but have yet to forge an agreement with China Mobile due to disagreements on revenue sharing terms. Talks have gone on for years. China Mobile also uses a different 3G network from the rest of the globe, and Apple may need to wait until a new network usable by the mobile carrier is available before it could launch the iPhone on that network. China Mobile has indicated it would not release an iPhone until it had a working 4G network.

Cook also met with government officials in Beijing, including China’s minister for industry and information technology. He also met with high level executives from China Unicom.

Due to the lack of agreement with China Mobile, Apple has lost much in the China market to competition from other smartphone brand such as Samsung Electronics and Lenovo.

Cook did not indicate a timeline for making China its number one market, but indicated the company’s presence in the country would steadily grow. Apple currently has only 11 stores in China and Hong Kong, and plans to increase that number to 25.

Apple earned $5.7 billion in sales from China in the quarter through December, about 16 percent of its global efforts.

Damages will be set at a later trial, though MobileMedia’s CEO Larry Horn told Bloomberg they will likely be “substantial.”

“We’re very pleased,” Horn told Bloomberg in a courtroom interview after the trial. “We think it’s justified.”

Filed in 2010, the original claim included 14 total patents, but that number was narrowed down to three as the case went to trial this year. Centered around camera phone technology and how the phone handled calls, the three patents include one for transmitting pictures from one camera to another, one that handled how a phone would reject a call, and another that dealt with the hold status pm the phone. MobileMedia claimed it would suffer “irreparable injury” if Apple was allowed to use the patented technology without royalty payments.

Apple had argued in court filings that MobileMedia’s patents are legally invalid and lacked “legally sufficient” evidence to prove infringement.

MobileMedia owns about 300 patents. While some would be quick to dub the company a “patent troll,” the company does monetize payments on behalf of Nokia and Sony, which owns about 10 percent of the company.

The case required the jury to examine technology from the mid to late ‘90s when it was first invented, Bloomberg reported.

Apple has been fighting its own patent battles and appears to be winning them. Last August, the company was awarded $1 billion when a jury ruled Samsung had violated six out of seven patents, a decision that is being appealed.

“We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook related in an extensive interview with Businessweek. “So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.

“Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,” Cook also told the publication. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it.”

Even before Cook gave his interview, traces of the production change had hit the web, with buyers reporting “Assembled in the USA” labels on newly bought Macs.

Apple had assembled many of its products in the US before moving most production to Asia to save on labor costs in the late ’90s. Several parts for the iPhone and iPad are already made in the US, including the display glass that is manufactured in Kentucky. Besides being headquartered in California where it designs its products, the company is building a campus in Austin, Texas. It is also expanding an existing data center in North Carolina, and has begun production on new data centers in Oregon and Nevada.

In the Bloomberg interview, Cook also defended Apple against criticism of Foxconn’s labor practices, pointing out the computer company enlisted the Fair Labor Association to audit Foxconn’s factories.

“We’re doing a number of things that I think are really great, really different, and industry-leading,” Cook said. “No one is looking at this as deeply as we are or going as deep in the supply chain.”

Though a new evolution for the company, Apple’s move to shift Mac production to the US will have minimal effect on the country’s 8 percent unemployment rate. The company’s sales are shifting away from Macs to the iPad, which is more complicated to produce domestically. Yet while its just a beginning effort, the move is a big change of heart that transitions the company’s image away from that of a near slave labor manufacturer.

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures and joined by Goldman Sachs, and existing investors Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others. It brings the company’s total investment to $39 million.

“The Redpoint team has been looking at data center architectures for a good while now – and we’ve been particularly focused on the open opportunity to address the limitations of networking architecture,” said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “Big Switch’s open ecosystem approach and its brilliant team have created a breakthrough disruption at the right moment – and we’re very proud to participate in supporting their vision.”

The company provides network flexibility by allowing multiple networks to act as a single network, thus providing better network control of such devices as routers and switches. The platform is highly scalable and designed to address businesses’ limits on virtual and physical infrastructure by providing virtual overlays between hypervisor-based switches as well as OpenFlow switches, thus offering end-to-end network virtualization. Its API is 100 percent compatible with Floodlight, the only Apache-licensed SDN controller, so its supported by a large ecosystem of applications. Its technology allows businesses to change networks and data centers without expensive hardware upgrades.

Founded in 2010 and based in Palo Alto, the company will use the new funding to expand engineering, sales and marketing teams to ramp up its market.

“We started this revolutionary trend away from closed and proprietary systems, and are gratified that every major physical and virtual infrastructure vendor is now participating,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. “Working with our ecosystem of partners, the Big Switch platform will disrupt networking applications as we know them today.”

Spun out of research done in the UK Ministry of Defense, RainStor produces a database that deduplicates the data at an extreme compression of 97 percent to reduce petabytes of capacity to low terabytes. It provides a data retention solution that’s instantly searchable at about a tenth of the price of the industry standard.

“(We address) the business requirement to store and manage Big Data at lowest cost scale with the least complexity and ensure the business users have flexible access for query and analysis in addition to meeting data-driven compliance regulations,” explained John Bantleman, RainStor’s CEO, in an email to Red Herring.

The company began in January running its databases on the Apache Hadoop Distributed File System, which provides wider scalability options to multi-petabyte potential. More than using Hadoop as a connector, the company actually runs its platform on Hadoop with no need to transfer large amounts of data between the platform and the client. The company claims its platform is easier to use and doesn’t require a large IT staff to manage it.

Wide scalability of data has become essential to enterprises, with data growth rates rising 50 to 100 percent annually, Bantleman explained. The innovation of the open source Apache Hadoop makes storing and managing of big data possible because it does require enterprise grade capabilities such as standard SQL access in addition to built-in availability and security.

“We are changing the economics of big data management for the enterprise and targeting the largest banks and communications operators worldwide to provide business value at the lowest TCO,” he stated.

The company serves over 100 global enterprises, and has been growing at a 100 to 200 percent growth rate. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has development centers in the UK, and sells its technology through partnerships to Europe, the US, Japan, India, and Africa.

The company will use the new funding to accelerate its engineering team and expand its sales and marketing departments. The company will open several offices in the US, including one in New York City.

“The market need is very strong and we believe that banking, financial services, communications and government have been living with Big Data challenges for a long time,” Bantleman said. “The market timing is excellent right now because there is strong demand across many of these sectors and innovative technology capabilities that are already proven and reaping benefits and rewards.”

Rainstor was a 2011 Red Herring North America Award winner.

“There are lots of external design similarities between the iPhone and Galaxy S, such as rounded corners and large screens … but these similarities had been documented in previous products,” a judge at the Seoul Central District Court said on Friday. “Given that it’s very limited to make big design changes in touchscreen based mobile products in general … and the defendant (Samsung) differentiated its products with three buttons in the front and adopted different designs in camera and (on the) side, the two products have a different look.”

The court comes just ahead of expected US verdicts in deliberation that began this week. Apple sued Samsung in US federal court for $2.5 billion in damages over claims the company had stolen its designs. A judge later granted an injunction against Samsung to halt the US launch of the Galaxy S III.

However, the judge hit both companies with patent violations and halted certain sales for each. Apple was found to have infringed on two of Samsung’s wireless technology patents and fined $35,400. Samsung was found to have violated one Apple patent related to a bouncing back function for scrolling documents.

Samsung was ordered to immediately halt the South Korean sale of 10 products that include the Galaxy S II. Apple was ordered stop halt sales of four products that include the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. All sales bans were on out-dated products, as Apple’s iPhone 4S and its latest version of the iPad came out after the South Korean lawsuit was filed.

“We welcome today’s ruling, which affirms our position that Apple has been using our mobile telecommunications standards patents without having obtained the necessary licenses,” Samsung said in a statement. “Today’s ruling also affirmed our position that one single company cannot monopolize generic design features.”

The company recently announced the milestone on its blog, as well as the policy change of two people per vehicle. Google employees can now begin taking the cars to work solo, as they’ve been deemed safe for commute, though wide range public adoption is still has “a long road ahead,” Google cautioned on its blog.

The technology will first need to learn to handle snow, construction cones, and other “tricky conditions” hazardous to teenagers and robots alike. Still, the announcement means someday you’ll finally be able to finish “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” cover to cover in rush hour traffic without worry about the bumper in front of you.

“This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter,” Google stated in its blog. “One day, we hope this technology will enable people to be more productive in their cars.”

In 2010, the company first announced its self driving cars that use sensors, radar and computers to navigate through traffic. Google touts that the cars are actually safer than human drivers as the cars are programmed to establish a boundary of obstructions around themselves at all times. Last February, Nevada passed regulations allowing self driving cars, though it will likely be years before they are available for the general public. Early use cases will most likely involve self-driving taxi cabs or pizza delivery robots instead of your neighborhood teenager.

Still, Google engineers have apparently grown up in the age of “The Terminator,” and aren’t leaving anything to chance. Human drivers remain at the controls “to take over if needed.” Judging by human behavior, however, we’re better off leaving it to computers to drive us around, since they don’t drink, fall asleep at the wheel, or run their fellow commuters down in a fit of road rage.

That’s an impressive feat in a country where even the cheapest iPads cost 7 to 8 percent of an average worker’s annual salary. Prices have come down from the iPad’s initial Chinese release, which likely contributed to iPad’s 20 percent market share increase in China over the previous quarter, but still represent a whopping budget item for the average Chinese family.

Still, China has middle class of 250 million people and growing, so there are likely plenty who can afford the tablet that are well above the average annual income in China, perhaps soon to be more than the population of the US.

Lenovo, the world’s second largest PC manufacturer, held a distant 8.4 percent market share in China. Samsung managed a 7.69 percent year on year decrease in market share in China, ranking at 3.59 percent.

Apple launched the iPad onto the Chinese market last March, but sales were delayed in many regions over a trademark dispute between Proview Shenzhen Technology, which claimed rights to the iPad trademark since 2000. Apple had bought the rights to the company from a Proview subsidiary which the larger company claimed had not authorized the sale. A Hong Kong court later ruled that Apple had rights to the trademark and could begin selling the iPads on the Chinese market.

The latest numbers from IDC indicate that total world shipments of the iPad hit 25 million units in the second quarter of 2012, up from 18.7 the previous quarter, with a 68.2 percent market share. Worldwide shipments of iPads have grown 84.3 percent in the last year. Comparatively, Samsung, Apple’s next in line competitor, holds a 9.6 percent global market share.