Corente, Responsys Acquisitions Puff Up Oracle Cloud 

Oracle bought Xsigo Systems back in June 2013 so it could virtualize network links for server clusters and their storage across local area networks, and now it has snapped up Corente to provide virtual links over wide area networks to connect datacenters to each other or to public clouds. Both the Xsigo and Corente products are key components of the company's software defined networking strategy.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Oracle expects for the management team and other employees from Corente to join Oracle when the deal closes sometime in early 2014.

Corente was founded in 2007 by Jack Keane, the company's chief scientist, and Sam Bendinelli, senior vice president of engineering and operations. The company is located in Bernardsville, New Jersey, which is of course the stomping grounds of AT&T. Both Keane and Bendinelli had executive positions at Lucent Technologies, which was created from the spinout of the research and telecom equipment manufacturing arms of AT&T back in 1996.

Here's where Corente's Cloud Services Exchange fits into the Oracle stack:

Corente's WAN virtualization tools have three components. The Cloud Services Gateway is a virtual appliance that is deployed onto server endpoints that allows those endpoints to link to each other over WAN links through the Cloud Services Exchange. This exchange runs in a cloud itself and provides private and secure IP links between those endpoints. The Corente stack also includes a Services Portal, which is used to provision, manage, and monitor those WAN links and which has role-based access so administrators and users can have different levels of access to the Corente services.

Oracle said in a statement announcing the deal that it would be creating a unified LAN and WAN virtualization tool, but did not detail how the Corente and Xsigo tools might be mashed up. How these networking tools – does everything have to be called software defined now? – might be integrated with the cloud controller that Oracle got through its acquisition of Nimbula last March as well as Enterprise Manager, the main management tool that Oracle uses for all of its software, also remains to be seen. But if history is any guide, the Corente Services Portal will eventually be sucked into Enterprise Manager. Oracle has been clear that the Corente tools will be used to link companies to the Oracle Cloud public cloud, and that Corente was acquired specifically to make this process easier.

Corente never divulged how many customers it had, only saying that it had Fortune 100 customers in over 60 countries. British Telecom used the Corente tools as part of its enterprise cloud, and Illinois Tool Works, a diversified manufacturer that includes Hobart, Reddi-Pac, Wolf, Vulcan, Instron, and Avery Berkel products, uses the cloudy WAN virtualizer to link applications in hundreds of business units around the globe. Marco Polo New World, a division of Perseus Telecom that provides access to over 100 financial trading networks, also uses the Corente tools to provide access to those networks for its clients.

In a separate announcement just before the holidays, Oracle said that it was shelling out $1.5 billion to buy Responsys, a maker of business-to-business, cloud-based marketing software with over 450 customers. The software automates marketing across email, mobile, social, and display advertising elements of the Internet and has LEGO, LinkedIn, Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, and United Healthcare are marquee customers using the software. Oracle had already acquired Eloqua in December 2012 for $871 million to get a cloud-based business-to-consumer marketing tool. Now it has B2B locked up, too. Responsys, which is traded publicly, has grown steadily and had $162.8 million in sales and $7.6 million in net income in 2012. This acquisition is expected to close sometime in the first half of 2012 – unless someone swoops in and offers to pay more for the company, of course.