Oracle acquires Dutch cloud start-up Wercker

Oracle promises to keep Wercker's community edition free

Oracle has acquired Dutch Docker-based continuous delivery platform developer Wercker.

Wercker provides an open-source command-line interface with which developers can create Docker containers on their desktop, automate their build and deploy processes, and then deploy them to various cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. The company has offices in Amsterdam, London and San Francisco, California.

"Wercker empowers organizations and their development teams to achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) goals with micro-services and Docker. This is brought to life through Wercker's container-centric and cloud-native automation platform comprised of their local command line interface (CLI), online SaaS platform and API," claimed Oracle in a statement that didn't give much away.

Until the deal is formally closed, both companies will continue to operate independently.

The statement continued: "Oracle and Wercker share the view that developers greatly benefit from focusing on building great products and applications. Oracle is building a leading IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] and PaaS [platform-as-a-service] platform as the foundation for a new generation of cloud computing.

"A leading cloud needs great tooling and adding Wercker's container lifecycle management to Oracle's Cloud provides engineering teams with the developer experience they deserve to build, launch and scale their applications. Together, Oracle and Wercker will democratise developer tooling for the modern cloud."

In a Q&A released with the statement, Oracle claimed that that rationale for the acquisition was the traction that Wercker had achieved helping "tens of thousands of users create millions of build and deployment pipelines that developers love and use every day". It also promised more investment in Wercker's core technology when the deal closes, and to keep the company's community edition free.

Founded in 2011 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the company received around $1m in seed funding from a group of venture capital investment firms in 2013, including Greylock Venture Partners, Shamrock Ventures and VC Vitulum Ventures, a micro-VC based in Amsterdam.

A further funding round in October 2014 raised a further $2.4m, and a month after the company brought in OpenStack co-founder Andy Smith as chief technology officer. On top of that, the company raised $4.5m in a Series A investment round in January 2016.

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