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Now that both Virtual Iron and Sun acquisitions are complete, Oracle owns three hypervisors, a couple of virtualization-friendly enterprise management consoles and a connection broker.
What the company is missing is everything else around the hypervisor, from capacity planning to VMs backup.
Oracle may decide to own the missing pieces, trying to rival the impressive VMware portfolio, or work to build a reach ecosystem, trying to convince several third parties to become virtualization partners. And while it’s true that the VMware aggressive expansion is pushing its partners in new directions, most vendors are mostly looking for deals with Microsoft or Citrix.
For these firms, focusing the limited R&D resources on Oracle VM is a risky move considering its scarce adoption after more than two years on the market.
At the same time anyway, there are two big opportunities in embracing the Oracle way: first of all, the early partners get as many deals as they can without competition; secondarily, if their success is remarkable, Oracle may always consider an acquisition.
So it doesn’t surprise too much that the Canadian startup Lanamark is one of the first to join the Oracle PartnerNetwork. Oracle can use its capacity planning platform to demonstrate the density Oracle VM can achieve and validate it against more popular hypervisors.
The move may be just the first of a long series in different areas. Oracle needs partners (or more owned components) if it really wants to compete against VMware.