Oracle executives have been touting the growth of the company's PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings, but with a new acquisition have acknowledged it needs to do more to attract developers. This week, Oracle announced it had acquired Dutch startup Wercker, which makes a continuous integration and delivery platform centered around Docker container-based applications. Here are the key details from Oracle's announcement:
Oracle and Wercker share the view that developers greatly benefit from focusing on building great products and applications. Oracle is building a leading IaaS and PaaS 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 democratize developer tooling for the modern cloud.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Formed in 2012, Docker has around 20 employees and had raised only about $8 million in funding over three rounds, suggesting that the price tag was likely on the modest side. Wercker is integrated with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Slack and Kubernetes.
Wercker has tens of thousands of users, who have developed millions of build and deployment pipelines, according to a statement. It competes with the likes of CircleCI, Codeship and Jenkins.
Its not clear whether Oracle will deprecate Wercker's integrations with rival cloud providers, particularly AWS, which has been a key target of competitive rhetoric from executive chairman Larry Ellison.
Oracle will continue offering a community edition of Wercker, according to an FAQ document. Support for GitHub and BitBucket will remain.
Wercker's founder and CEO Micha Hernández van Leuffen provided a rationale for the deal in a blog post:
The world of software is changing and so is the world of enterprise. More than ever, we see incumbents in every sector feeling the heat from much smaller competitors who demonstrate an ability to more quickly respond to customers armed with more information and choices than ever before.
Wercker’s Docker-based platform has a strong, rapidly growing user base as companies, large and small, transition to container-based workloads. Developers will now have access to a strong Docker-based portfolio as part of Oracle PaaS and IaaS.
"It's a good acqusition as Oracle needs to become more attractive for deploying containers and microservices, with the necessary DevOps scaffold around it," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Wercker brings this to them."
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