As soon as it received the green light to complete the Sun acquisition, Oracle moved on and acquired AmberPoint.
AmberPoint is a US company that offers application management and application performance measurement solutions.
It provides a real-time view into performance and runtime behavior of distributed applications, and raises alerts when SLA limits are approaching or when transactions fail to complete, or when certain business parameters are violated.
While this has no direct connection to virtualization, there’s at least another product in the virtualization industry that offers (or may offer in the future) similar capabilities: VMware AppSpeed, which was launched in July 2009 after the May 2008 acquisition of B-hive.
VMware and Oracle are both embracing the fabric computing approach.
VMware is working to control all tiers from the hypervisor up to the application level (see the acquisition of SpringSource and Zimbra), leaving everything below to its partners (and investors) EMC and Cisco.
Oracle already is in control of all tiers after the Sun acquisition, but it still has to provide a seamless integration.
In both cases, there’s a real need for smart engines that automatically manipulate the fabric building blocks to guarantee the SLAs for all those mission-critical applications that customers may want to deploy. Those engines have to rely on some sort of intelligence to understand what application (or virtual machine) has a performance degradation and why. That’s here that products like AmberPoint and AppSpeed become handy.
Again: if Oracle will be able to integrate all the technologies it now owns in the proper way, it may come out of the blue with a remarkable cloud computing platform that actualizes exactly the VMware vision. Yes, even if Larry Ellison hates the term cloud computing.