Oracle gets a piece of PaaS with Engine Yard investment

Oracle, which for the past year or so has proclaimed itself a cloud company, now has at least part of a Platform as a Service story. It’s made an investment – the amount was undisclosed — in Engine Yard, a PaaS provider that supports Ruby, Node.js and PHP.

The company has long been a rumored acquisition target especially since Salesforce.com bought Heroku  in 2010, starting a sort of run on PaaS companies.

The investment was disclosed in a blog post by Engine Yard CEO John Dillon who is no stranger to Oracle. He was CEO of Hyperion, an analytics company Oracle acquired in 2007 for $ 3.3 billion. Before that, he was a regional manager at Oracle itself.

In his post, Dillon wrote:

“The cloud market is moving fast and in the coming years will play an essential role for all companies around the globe. Oracle’s investment and partnership will help us to continue to improve our products and support, so Engine Yard remains at the forefront of the cloud revolution.”

In a statement, Thomas Kurian, the executive VP who runs Oracle’s development tools and middleware efforts, said the company will integrate Engine Yard’ s platform into “the Oracle Cloud” to extend Oracle’s web application development capabilities.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickruser Peter Kaminski


GigaOM