Oracle buys Palerra for cloud management and security

Another one in the bag for Larry Ellison

Oracle has announced yet another cloud acquisition with the purchase of Palerra, a cloud access security broker (CASB), for an undisclosed sum.

Oracle acquired the company for Loric, which "protects and assures compliance of applications, workloads and sensitive data stored across cloud services", according to Oracle.

The company's software provides a combination of visibility into cloud usage, data security, user behaviour analytics, and security configuration, together with automated incident responses. Customers can respond to cloud security incidents in real-time, protecting sensitive company data and workloads across all of the leading cloud services.

"Together, Oracle and Palerra will help accelerate cloud adoption securely by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services.

"The combination of Oracle Identity Cloud Service and Palerra's CASB solution plan to deliver comprehensive protection for users, applications and APIs, data, and infrastructure to secure customer adoption of cloud," claimed Peter Barker, senior vice president of identity management and security products at Oracle, in a letter to customers.

In addition to the core Loric product, Oracle is also acquiring the company for the domain knowledge and expertise of its founders and staff.

The acquisition is the eighth for Oracle this year, after the purchases of AddThis in January, Ravello in February, Crosswise and Textura in April, Opower in May, NetSuite in July, and LogFire in September 2016.

Oracle's acquisition strategy has been focused on cloud and cloud computing acquisitions in recent years in a bid to make up ground lost to Amazon, Microsoft and SAP - ground that founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison now claims that Oracle has recovered.

In a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld just yesterday, Ellison focused his fire on Amazon - especially its Redshift database. "Redshift is developed by Amazon, only runs in Amazon, once you're moved in, you can't ever move Redshift out," he said.

He went on to describe how it was "cheap to move the data in, but very expensive to move it out... Some people would call that the ultimate lock-in."