With a simple two sentence statement posted on the Oracle Corporate Website, software giant Oracle announced that it had acquired cloud startup Ravello Systems on Monday, stating:
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.
Ravello Systems was founded in 2011 by the team that created the KVM hypervisor. That team took its virtualization know how and created at Ravello what it called a "nested virtualization powered cloud service" which wraps complex application environments into self-contained capsules in order to run them on any cloud. To bring that technology to market, the company launched a successful public Beta back in February 2013 and then pushed the product globally later that same year in August.
Delivered as-a-service, Ravello enables enterprises to recreate entire application environments with existing VMware or KVM virtual machines and complex networking, to be deployed on any cloud, without any changes. As an example, Ravello announced at AWS Re:Invent 2014 that it could clone an exact replica of a customer's entire VMware vSphere environment, and then transfer that environment to Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. Once moved, Ravello could spin-up that complete environment in less than 20 minutes.
It's that idea behind grabbing those on-premises virtualization environments and the construct of easily migrating or creating Hybrid Cloud environments that is causing companies to salivate over the possibilities - case in point the recent IBM and VMware partnership announcement.
In a company blog post, Rami Tamir, CEO of Ravello Systems, said that after the transaction closes, his team will join the Oracle Public Cloud (OPC) organization and Ravello's products will become part of Oracle Cloud.
"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," said Tamir.
And perhaps in an effort to calm fears of existing Ravello customers as to the acquisition news, he went on to say, "I want to emphasize that our top priority is ensuring an uninterrupted service and seamless experience for you and all of our customers and partners. Rest assured, Ravello’s service will continue as is."
The Oracle Cloud offers services across a full suite of products in software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
"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," said Tamir.
As of last year, Ravello had raised $54 million, including a $28 million funding round announced in January of 2015. Investors included Qualcomm Ventures, SanDisk Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Vintage Investment Partners.
No terms of the Ravello acquisition have been disclosed, although various reports have estimated the deal to be somewhere between $400-500 million.
Ravello Systems joins a long list of acquisitions made by Oracle over these last few years in its push to develop the Oracle Public Cloud in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Vendors often make acquisitions like this to gain technologies they don't already have; but in this case, the acquisition of this young cloud startup also adds much needed cloud developers and professionals to Oracle's growing cloud team. At the same time, it also takes a highly valuable multi-cloud technology out of play for other would-be beneficiaries. Now the question remains, will Ravello continue to be cross-functional across multiple cloud types? Or will it ultimately only migrate workloads to Oracle's cloud platform.