Oracle Acquires Ravello Systems, Gets Virtualization Tech To Expand Oracle Public Cloud

Oracle has acquired Ravello Systems in a move the company said will enhance the Oracle Public Cloud.

Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., did not say much about the acquisition other than a two-sentence statement on the company's website: "On February 22, 2016, Oracle signed an agreement to acquire Ravello Systems. All Ravello employees will be joining Oracle as part of Oracle Public Cloud."

However, Ravi Tamir, CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ravello Systems, wrote in a Monday blog post that after the transaction closes, his team will join the Oracle Public Cloud organization and the company's products will become part of Oracle Cloud.

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"We believe this agreement will accelerate our ability to reach more customers, deliver more value, and enhance our technology at an accelerated pace in order to better serve you," Tamir wrote.

The Oracle Cloud offers best-in-class services related to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Tamir wrote.

"Ravello will join in Oracle’s IaaS mission to allow customers to run any type of workload in the cloud, accelerating Oracle’s ability to help customers quickly and simply move complex applications to the cloud without costly and time-consuming application rewrites," he wrote.

No mention was made of the selling price. However, online publication Venture Beat, citing an unnamed source close to the deal, reported that Oracle paid $500 million for Ravello.

Oracle declined to provide further information on the acquisition, while Ravello Systems did not respond to a CRN request for more information by publication time.

Ravello Systems, founded by the team that introduced the KVM hypervisor, came to market in 2013 as a developer of virtualization technology to make applications work with multiple cloud providers or platforms.

The company last year developed nested virtualization, a technology that allows a hypervisor to run inside a virtual machine, as a way to move workloads from VMware private clouds to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform public clouds, without requiring apps to be rebuilt.

Ravello Systems joins a long list of acquisitions Oracle has made in its push to develop the Oracle Public Cloud and compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

They include the December 2015 acquisition of Docker container startup StackEngine; the September 2014 acquisition of content storage management solution developer Front Porch Digital; the September 2012 acquisition of SelectMinds for cloud-based talent management; and the April 2012 acquisition of Taleo for its cloud-based human capital management solutions.