Oracle, aiming to expand the reach of its cloud platform, has partnered with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) developer Engine Yard.
Oracle has made an unspecified investment in Engine Yard and will partner with the company to leverage its cloud development platform to make its own applications more easily deployable and accessible in the cloud.
Engine Yard's PaaS platform, which supports the programming languages Ruby, PHP and Node.js, automates cloud configuration and deployment, allowing developers to build and manage cloud applications.
[Related: 7 Ways To Capitalize On The Cloud]
After a slow start, Oracle has moved quickly this year to build out its cloud services. The company has developed its own PaaS service, including the Oracle database and Fusion middleware. Its cloud service includes infrastructure, data storage and virtualization running on its Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud Server and Exalytics In-Memory Machine.
The integration with Engine Yard's development platform will open up its services to more developers who will add more capabilities for cloud deployments.
"Developers building new web applications in Ruby, PHP and Node.js to meet growing demands associated with mobile and social computing need a robust web PaaS offering," Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development, said in a statement. "We are looking forward to integrating the Oracle Cloud with Engine Yard’s platform to further extend our PaaS capabilities for web application development."
Engine Yard will remain as an independent company.
Abdul Sheikh, CTO of Cintra Software & Services, Oracle's Specialized Partner of the Year for Oracle's Database Appliance, said the company is moving quickly to establish itself in the cloud space.
"They've gone from zero to a comprehensive offering of business applications in the cloud very quickly," Sheikh said in an interview with CRN. "They are enhancing offerings to the development community around their Java and Open Source service model. Exadata and Exalogic are big differentiators, providing a competitive edge based on a quantum leap in capabilities provided by [Oracle's] Engineered systems."
"They are building on capabilities in the suite of development tools to increase the interest of developers so they can compete with the cloud services offerings from other providers," he added.
Ken Judd, CFO of Dallas, Texas-based Keste, another Oracle partner, also endorsed the Engine Yard investment and said his company is adding Oracle's cloud services to its portfolio as they are rolled out.
"We think Oracle is going in the right direction," Judd said. "Oracle has the right hardware and software to get customers in the cloud, as we are putting the services together to help them do that."
PUBLISHED NOV. 15, 2012
