Oracle buys Palerra to boost its security stack

Oracle is kicking off a big customer confab in San Francisco this week, and to mark the event, it’s announced an acquisition. Oracle is buying Palerra, a cloud security startup co-founded by Oracle alums Rohit Gupta (its CEO) and Ganesh Kirti (CTO).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we will try to find out. Palerra was founded in 2013 (originally called Apprity) and raised $25 million with investors including Norwest Venture Partners and August Capital.

Palerra’s business currently focuses on providing security automation for enterprise apps, covering not just data in the apps but as that data “moves across services and it offers several layers of protection across infrastructure and software services,” as we wrote about them last year.

The company will continue to serve its existing customers as well as work on more services for the future, Gupta notes in a blog post announcing the news.

At a time when companies are facing more sophisticated cyber attacks than ever before, Palerra’s feature set is in demand: it covers  breach discovery, compliance, insider threat detection and incident response.

While Gupta and Oracle are not giving many details of the new product road map, Gupta notes that they will be working on integrations with Oracle’s platform.


“Together, Oracle and Palerra will help accelerate cloud adoption securely by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services,” he writes. “The combination of Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service and Palerra’s CASB platform plan to deliver comprehensive protection for users, applications and APIs, data, and infrastructure to secure enterprises in their adoption of Cloud and SaaS applications.”

You can see how the company could apply it as an added feature covering its own enterprise software, or as a standalone product much as it is sold today.

Oracle has made well over 100 acquisitions to date, but not many in the area of security. Others include Oblix in 2005 and device management startup Bitzer Mobile in 2013.

Courtesy : Techgig

Oracle Proposes That NetBeans Move To Apache

NetBeans is often regarded as the also ran in the IDE stakes, but this is more an error of perception than reality. Lots of people use it and lots of people think it is better than the alternatives - me for one. Now the news is worrying. Oracle, a company well known for caring little for open source, is trying to get Apache to take on NetBeans. Is this the end, or the beginning...


If you don't use NetBeans, and especially if you use Eclipse, you might not be too worried about its fate. But you should be. Oracle took over Sun's collection of open source software when it took over Sun and it hasn't done a particularly good job of managing the projects. So far we have seen Open Office move to Apache and slow down development to the point where rumors of its closure seem all too believable. While MySQL hasn't suffered the same fate, presumably because Oracle is making some money out of the enterprise edition, it did spark the fork to MariaDB and the community is still worried that the enterprise edition is hurting the core open source MySQL. Of course, there is also Java which has been a source of worry since Oracle took over control.

NetBeans looks like being the next source of anxiety.

While it started out aimed at Java, today it is a full featured IDE that can cope with HTML, JavaScript, PHP, C and C++, plus a few others via plugins. It is reasonably fast and does all of the things you expect from a modern IDE - and it doesn't crash much, which is what finally made me switch from Eclipse.

At the moment NetBeans is, in my opinion, the number one cross-platform multi-language open source IDE.

Now the news is that it is being considered for adoption by the Apache Foundation. To most this presumably looks like Oracle giving up on NetBeans and leaving it to fend for itself in Apache. Look what happened to Open Office, and to many other projects. The disasters are so numerous that some are saying that Apache is where projects go to die. On the other hand NetBeans has 1.5 million users and a thriving community, so perhaps it will survive the transition and emerge stronger than ever.

The problem with this rosy view of things is that it ignores the support that Oracle currently provides the project. Most of the commits are by Oracle programmers paid for by Oracle. Given how focused Oracle is on its bottom line profit, it is likely the the plan is to cut support for NetBeans by not paying for programmers to work on it.

What is absolutely clear is that Oracle plans to save some money by not having to support NetBeans. It has asked that Apache takes over and migrates:

the large existing Mercurial repository to Apache Git

internal Oracle release infrastructure to Apache infrastructure

plugin publication system, plugins.netbeans.org, to Apache infrastructure

website and related content management system to Apache infrastructure

any other infrastructure that they might have missed.

There is currently no word on how many paid programmers Oracle will supply or let go.

So is this the end for NetBeans?

Probably not, but only because it is so well developed. It is a fairly mature product which only really needs maintenance to keep it up with the latest language releases. It doesn't really seem to need any deep cleaning of the code base, which Open Office needed when it was forked to LibreOffice. And there isn't a faction that want to fork it to another project and so split its programming resources.

The conclusion, and this is my conclusion, is that in this case things are not as bad as they might seem to be at first look. Yes, Oracle is trying to dump NetBeans but the community can probably carry it. What happens if Apache decides not to take it is a bigger and more worrying question - it can hardy move to the Eclipse Foundation!

If you haven't tried NetBeans I urge you to give it a go - you will be pleasantly surprised, unless of course you're a "emacs is enough" sort of programmer.

Courtesy : Techgig

Oracle acquires LogFire for cloud-based warehouse management

Oracle announced Tuesday it's acquiring LogFire, an Atlanta, Ga.-based company that provides cloud-based warehouse management applications to boost supply chain efficiency.

LogFire, which is used by 40 companies including Glad and Ryder rental trucks, will remain available. The company claims expertise in installing Tier 1 warehouse management solutions (WMS) and having the software to power it.

The LogFire team will be integrated into Oracle's Supply Chain Management (SCM) division.

"Oracle will leverage our expertise in the cloud-based warehouse management space while we integrate into Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud's broad suite of innovative applications that enables supply chain organizations to modernize their supply chain processes," wrote Diego Pantoja-Navajas, founder and CEO of LogFire, in a statement.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

"The addition of LogFire will complement the logistics functionality of the Oracle SCM Cloud by adding cloud-based warehouse management capabilities," wrote Rick Jewell, SVP of Oracle SCM Applications Development, in a statement.

Courtesy : ZDNET