Oracle Targets Cloud Infrastructure Interconnectivity with Corente Buy

Oracle kicked off the new year with a noteworthy deal to acquire a cloud infrastructure provider. The company has agreed to buy Corente, whose Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) connects enterprises that operate as service providers with other private and public clouds over IP networks.

Terms of the deal, slated to close later this quarter, were not disclosed. 

CSX is a service that interconnects, secures and manages distributed apps via disparate networks. CSX claims to support any transport, application or service provider network so long as it's an IT network. Oracle said it intends to offer cloud infrastructure services with software-defined networks virtualizing enterprise LANs and WANs, letting enterprises -- namely those that operate as their own internal service providers -- to securely manage and interconnect multiple clouds and networks.

Most of Oracle's major cloud acquisitions -- including CRM provider RightNow and Taleo, which helps organizations manage human resources -- have been aimed at taking on archrival Salesforce.com by bolstering its Software as a Service (SaaS) portfolio. Just last month, Oracle said it will pay $1.5 billion to acquire Responsys, which provides cloud-based marketing software.

But at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in October, Oracle indicated it will step up its cloud infrastructure portfolio, as well, launching Oracle Compute Cloud and Oracle Object Storage Cloud. Oracle also extended its cloud hardware portfolio last month with the Elastic Cloud X4-2, which provides hardware, software, networking and storage in a single machine. 

The addition of Corente gives Oracle a service provider network to provide interconnectivity between multiple private and public clouds.

"Oracle customers need networking solutions that span their datacenters and global networks," said Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect. "By combining Oracle's technology portfolio with Corente's industry-leading, platform-extending software-defined networking to global networks, enterprises will be able to easily and securely deliver applications and cloud services to their globally distributed locations."

Ironically, Corente's key technology partners include some Oracle rivals, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, as well as British Telecom, Cisco, Microsoft and VMware. Oracle's absence from Corente's list of strategic technology partners doesn't mean the two companies haven't worked together. Either way, it will be interesting to see if Oracle will maintain those relationships after the deal closes.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/09/2014 at 3:35 PM