Oracle Boosts SDN Portfolio With Corente Deal

Oracle officials have announced an interesting networking acquisition, after it said it would purchase Corente.

No financial terms for the deal were disclosed, which is expected to close in early 2014.

Private Networks

Corente’s technology is designed to make it easier for organisations to deploy cloud-based applications and services by enabling them to provision and manage global private networks that can securely and simply connect to any site and over any IP network, according to Oracle officials.

With Corente in the fold, Oracle will be able to offer technologies for cloud deployments with software-defined networking (SDN) solutions that virtualise both the LAN and WAN in the data centre, the officials said. The result will be faster deployment of services within the data centre, with enhanced security and manageability.

“Companies are looking for new ways to deliver a growing portfolio of cloud-based applications and services to their entire ecosystem without the long delays of securing and configuring complex infrastructures,” Edward Screven, chief corporate architect for Oracle, said in a letter to customers and partners. “Corente’s cloud-based service delivery platform quickly establishes trusted network services between public or private cloud data centres and any location over any IP network regardless of the type of transport, access, application, or provider involved.”

Oracle is looking to become more of an IT solutions provider, a move that would increase its competition with the likes of IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, all of whom are making significant investments in SDN. Oracle, which inherited a hardware business when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion (£4.5bn), has been working to create a portfolio of workload-specific systems – such as its ExaLogic and ExaData offerings – that can run other vendors’ software but is optimised for Oracle’s solutions.

Acquisition Spree

More recently, the company has been building out its networking capabilities through a series of acquisitions. The giant software vendor last year bought Xsigo Systems, which offers network virtualisation capabilities. Earlier in 2013, the company bought Acme Packet for $1.7 billion (£1bn) and mobile broadband service provider Tekelec.

Corente’s offerings include its Cloud Services Exchange – a delivery platform for cloud-based services between data centres and any other IP network site – and the Corente Services Gateway, an integrated virtual appliance that offers endpoint security on private networks. In addition, the Corente Services Portal helps organisations manage, provision and monitor private networks worldwide.

“Corente provides a full lifecycle approach to automating the provisioning and management of service delivery networks,” CEO Jim Zucco said in a statement. “Together with Oracle, we expect to deliver software-defined networking offerings that create cost-effective, secure networks, spanning global business ecosystems.”

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Originally published on eWeek.