Partners Ponder Strategies As Oracle Moves Further Into Cloud

By Ken Presti
March 14, 2013 7:16 PM ET

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Channel partners are eyeing Oracle's Wednesday announced Nimbula acquisition as a sign of the times as the popularity of the cloud continues to heat up and various vendors jockey for position.

"These are interesting times," said John DeSarbo, principal at ZS Associates, a sales consultancy with offices on three continents. "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."

Oracle on Wednesday issued an extremely brief statement announcing its intent to purchase Mountain View, Calif.-based Nimbula, Inc., which has positioned itself as a cloud operating system company specializing in infrastructure-as-a-service software for the development of private, hybrid or public clouds. Nimbula Director, the company's flagship product, is used to support software development and testing, SaaS hosting, batch processing, Hadoop deployments and related functionalities. Last year, Nimbula joined the OpenStack community to help further its market penetration.

"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," said Jeremy DeSpain, COO of Explore Consulting in Bellevue, Washington. "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?"

According to a prepared statement from Oracle, "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."

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