Oracle beefs up container credentials with Five Guys buyout

Hoovers up StackEngine

Oracle bounced back from a disappointing Q2 with a cunning plan to ease its way into the containers/DevOps space - by quietly taking over a five person Austin-based startup called StackEngine.

The database giant slipped in a filing to the SEC over the weekend announcing it had taken over StackEngine, and the share option obligations of the firm. All the firm’s staff will be joining Oracle “as part of the Oracle Public Cloud”.

We assume what Oracle means is that the five-person team, and the technology it has developed over the last year or so, will become part of Oracle’s cloud offering.*

That five-man team, which includes three co-founders, Eric Anderson, Bob Quillan and Robert Gordon - brings with it technology it promises will bring “enterprise grade management to container centric architectures”. It describes its flagship product, Container Application Centre, as an “end to end container application management solution that enables enterprises to transition from the costs and inefficiencies of virtualization to the flexibility, mobility and freedom of containerization.”

Gordon’s CV includes a stint with Oracle, while Quillin’s includes time with VMware and EMC. All three were at CopperEgg, a cloud monitoring startup bought by Idera a couple of years ago.

Last week Oracle released Q2 financials which showed revenues down 6 per cent to $8.9bn, while net income slid 12 per cent to $2.5bn. However, the top brass sought to shrug this off by pointing at a 26 per cent increase in cloud revenues to a stonking… $649m.

"We are still on-target to sell and book more than $1.5bn of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year," CTO and Chairman Ellison said. "That is considerably more SaaS and PaaS new business than any other cloud services provider including Salesforce.com." ®

*Unless Oracle has found a way to virtualise and abstract individuals, before uploading to a distributed infrastructure. If it has, Ellison’s never going to retire.