oracle virtual iron

Oracle To Terminate Virtual Iron Business

June 21, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Oracle recently acquired Virtual Iron, even if it wasn’t exactly generating spectacularly good financial results (to put it midly). Now The Register claims Oracle is discontuining Virtual Iron’s business. More specifically, Oracle intends to “suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

Oracle aims to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology with Oracle VM, the company’s server virtualization and management product, although it has not specified when the new combined product will arrive. Former Virtual Iron people are also being laid off.

Full report at The Register.

NY Times: Virtual Iron Was Bleeding Money When Oracle Bought It

May 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

We recently reported Oracle had acquired Virtual Iron, but now The NY Times has obtained financial documents that show Virtual Iron lost a heck of a lot of money in 2008:

“The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue.

Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million.

Last January, Virtual Iron raised $20 million, hiking its total funding up to $65 million. Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures all funded the company.

Oracle has declined to reveal how much it paid for Virtual Iron, but with the revenue in 2008 sitting so low, it seems pretty clear that the investors lost out on this start-up — that is, unless Oracle was willing to pay many, many times Virtual Iron’s revenue. (The company did report $17 million in cash and equivalents in 2008.)”

Ouch. Hard to get excited over this particular case of M&A, even in these troubled times.

Following Move To Acquire Sun, Oracle Buys Virtual Iron

May 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

As had been rumored for quite a while, Oracle has now agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, a provider of server virtualization management software that enables dynamic resource and capacity management in virtualized data centers (we’ve covered the company quite a bit in the past).

This comes right off the heels of Oracle’s move to swallow Sun Microsystems.

The combination of Virtual Iron’s technology and Oracle VM’s server virtualization product is expected to provide more comprehensive and dynamic resource management across the full software stack. Customers are expected to benefit from better capacity utilization, streamlined virtual server configuration, and improved visibility and control of their enterprise software.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close this summer. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Industry trends are driving demand for virtualization as a way to reduce operating expenses and support green IT strategies without sacrificing quality of service,” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering. “With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption. The acquisition is consistent with Oracle’s strategy to provide comprehensive enterprise software management and will facilitate more efficient management of application service levels.”

(Source: ZDnet)