On Wednesday of last week (May 13), Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron on its website. Virtual Iron is one of many software solutions that offer turnkey solutions for managing virtualization in the modern multicore computers. It should be noted that Oracle already has a similar product called Oracle VM, as well as with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems a little over a month, also acquired the popular virtualization software VirtualBox. The most surprising is that according to an article in The New York Times, Virtual Iron has lost in the year 2008 $ 15.3 million, after having lost $ 12.1 million in 2007, the total money collected by Virtual Iron for venture capitalists during the time that the company in the market is $ 65 million, among its major investors include Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.
Although nominally Oracle VM, Virtual Iron and Virtual Box are three different projects, all of them are based on technology developed by the Xen open source project, developed at the University of Cambridge. Most striking is that users of all three projects together do not equal the market share from industry leader VMware, which dominates 89% of the virtualization market, according to Gartner in a report published in 2008.
So what can motivate a company so far as successful as Oracle to acquire a business that does not bring any advantage, and that is redundant with products that already have fully developed and compete directly with Virtual Iron. May be that Oracle does not know what to do with the $ 8 billion in cash depending on their last balance sheet filed with the SEC.
If someone finds a sense of this decision buy Virtual Iron we explain in the comments, I really do not understand.