Oracle buys 2011 start-up Ravello for $500m

Oracle buys start-up specialising in nested virtualisation in the cloud

Software giant Oracle has made another cloud-computing acquisition with the $500m purchase of Ravello Systems - a company only founded in 2011.

Ravello specialises in nested virtualisation, providing tools to enable organisations to better manage their software and systems running in public cloud clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It enables users to quickly spin up applications for different cloud environments without having to modify them.

After the news became public, Oracle confirmed the deal, but didn't add much else: "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," is all the company would say in a statement.

Ravello CEO Rami Tamir was more effusive, and was keen to reassure customers that the company's services would continue in pretty much the same way. "Rest assured, Ravello's service will continue 'as is'. In the coming months, we will be working to continue enhancing our value to you and we are looking forward to developing new products and services enabled by this combination," he wrote in an open letter to customers.

Despite being just five years old, Ravello could already count a number of technology companies among its customers, including Red Hat, SUSE and Brocade.

TechMarketView analyst Angela Eager described Oracle as a "late infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) entrant" that is "running hard to catch up with AWS and Microsoft Azure".

She added that by purchasing Ravello, "it gets access to innovative cloud technology, a fit with Oracle's IaaS messaging, which is about making the cloud transition with minimal modification and providing every flavour of ‘as-a-service'.

"It also means no one else in the market gets hold of what Ravello and its team offers - and there are plenty who could have made use of it, from IBM upwards," said Eager.

The co-founders of Ravello - Tamir and Benny Schnaider - were also part of the team that developed the KVM hypervisor, which is now part of the core Linux virtualisation technology.