Oracle buys Virtual Iron

I just got word that Oracle has continued its spending spree by acquiriring Virtual Iron. After Oracle’s acquistion of Sun (see Oracle to Buy Sun – View from the Virtual World), it is clear that Oracle is building a soup to nuts virtualization story.

Here’s what Oracle has to say about Virtual Iron

News Facts

• Oracle has agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc. (Virtual Iron), a provider of server virtualization management software that enables dynamic resource and capacity management in virtualized data centers.
• The combination of Virtual Iron’s technology and Oracle VM’s scalable, high performance and highly available server virtualization product is expected to provide more comprehensive and dynamic resource management across the full software stack.
• Customers are expected to benefit from better capacity utilization, streamlined virtual server configuration, and improved visibility and control of their enterprise software.
• The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close this summer.
• Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently.
• Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Snapshot analysis

Virtual Iron has been on my radar screen for quite some time.  I’ve often written about how this company’s orchestration/management software.  This technology, combined with Oracle’s VM software would allow Oracle to directly address needs of quite a few customers.

It appears that many of the stand-alone vendors of orchestration software are feeling the pain caused by customers not always understanding or believing the claims of savings, performance and better reliability.  I’ve heard that Cassatt, Scalent and Virtual Iron were having difficulties.

Virtual Iron was a good choice for Oracle for a number of reasons including the following:

• Virtual Iron’s product is easy to install and easy to use making it ideal for SMB customers
• Virtual Iron’s product used the Xen hypervisor and could be readily enhanced to support either Oracle’s or Sun’s Xen-based hypervisor
• Virtual Iron’s product would allow Oracle to have a better, more powerful SMB offering