Oracle To Buy “Director” Cloud OS Developer Nimbula

US software giant Oracle has announced it will acquire the Silicon Valley start-up Nimbula, a company that develops software tools to control private, public and hybrid cloud deployments from a single dashboard.

Oracle didn’t reveal the price it will pay for the company, but analysts quoted by NASDAQ expect it to be “under $100 million,” based on Nimbula’s previous fund-raising efforts.

Oracle loves the cloud

Niumbula was founded in 2009 by former Amazon VP of engineering Chris Pinkham and Willem Van Biljon, another former Amazon Web Services employee. Both spearheaded the development of the popular EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) product, and brought their expertise to Nimbula.

Besides automated deployment and cloud management, Nimbula’s Director software can also scale as well as migrate existing applications into the cloud, and launch a multi-platform environment with flexible networking features.

The company is a member of the Open Stack Foundation and counts Yandex, the fourth most popular search engine in the world and Russia’s biggest web services company, among its main customers.

“Nimbula’s technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments. Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings,” said Oracle in a statement.

The deal comes 10 months after launch of the Oracle Public Cloud, a service that came into being even though CEO Larry Ellison had famously described cloud computing as “gibberish“. This year, the “gibberish” is expected to contribute $1 billion to Oracle’s revenue.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013.

Oracle purchased 11 companies in 2012, and started this year by acquiring networking technology business Acme Packet for $2 billion.

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