Oracle, the enterprise software giant, has acquired Nimbula, the cloud management software company built by the original creators of Amazon Web Services, to help brighten its cloud offering with some much needed direction.
Nimbula offers a cloud management platform that lets people easily establish on-premise pools of visualized storage.
“Nimbula’s technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments,” Oracle stated in a brief announcement on its website. “Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings.”
Though the price was undisclosed, technology analyst Charles King of Pund-IT estimated to the Wall St. Journal that the price was likely less than $100 million, based on Nimbula’s previous fundraising.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2013.
Oracle will be part of OpenStack, the open cloud organization, as Nimbula was a member. Oracle will join the organization along with other members that include VMWare, HP, Dell and IBM.
The acquisition was for Nimbula’s team and technology, including the founders who were the developers of Amazon EC2.
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.