Database giant Oracle has agreed to acquire Israeli cloud computing startup Ravello in a deal said to be worth $500 million, PC World reported on Tuesday.
The acquisition is seen as Oracle’s attempt to offer more comprehensive cloud-based services to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Ravello’s technology allows complex programs from any computing environment to be stored easily on cloud platforms. Cloud computing allows companies to forgo maintaining costly in-house infrastructure for services they can receive and operate online.
“Oracle Cloud offers best-in-class services across a full suite of products in software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” wrote Ravello CEO Rami Tamir in a post announcing the deal. “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.”
The Times of Israel explained that Ravello gained prominence in recent years for developing cloud technology called “visualization,” which “allows applications work with multiple cloud providers or platforms.” Last year, the company developed an application to facilitate “the transfer of data between different cloud platforms and servers.”
Based in Ra’anana, Ravello was founded in 2011 by Tamir and Benny Schnaider and now employs about 70 people.
The Times added:
The deal is the newest in a series of high-dollar Israeli exits that have painted the country’s high-tech sector as a fertile breeding ground for major Silicon Valley investment in recent years. In 2015, 70 Israeli high tech companies were bought out by larger firms for a total of $10.6 billion, second only to 2014’s $14.8 billion in deals, according to a PriceWaterhouseCooper report.
Oracle is the world’s second largest software developer after Microsoft, and specializes in database and enterprise computing systems.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison spoke of his “deep emotional connection to the state of Israel” in a 2014 interview with Israel’s Channel 10, commenting that “the renewal of the Jewish state is something that touches all of us. For 2000 years we were a stateless people and now we have a country of our own.” Ellison added that he was highly impressed with Israel’s startup community, noting that there’s an area near Herzliya with more startups than any place in the world except for Silicon Valley. He also rejected criticisms of Israel, emphasizing that the IDF took more care to avoid harming civilians than most other armies in the world.
The interview, which is embedded below, took place at a fundraiser for the IDF where Ellison pledged a reported $10 million.
[Photo: Oracle Office / YouTube ]