Oracle moved to fortify its processing capabilities
today, agreeing to acquire software maker Tangosol for an undisclosed
sum.
Tangosol makes Coherence Data Grid, a piece of data-grid software designed
to boost application performance for companies that need to process a high
volume of transactions in a short amount of time.
Data grids automatically provide “in-memory” replication across a grid of
computers ensuring guaranteed data availability in the event of a server
failure because data is stored within the computers in the grid and not on
the disks.
Such software is prized by financial services firms, whose brokers or
traders rely on mainframes or computer servers to handle millions of
transactions.
The grid software’s processing capabilities are also popular among
telecommunications businesses, which need software for processing
requests by large numbers of customers.
With many businesses moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to
handle the distributed computing workloads foisted upon them by the Web 2.0 era,
Coherence Data Grid’s ability to process transactions with speed and
precision makes it an attractive product.
“Service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web 2.0, and event-driven architecture
(EDA) are pushing backend infrastructures to their growth limits,” Oracle
said in a statement.
To offload the burden from the backend processing systems, Oracle said more
real-time transaction processing capabilities need to be built into the
middleware infrastructure. Tangosol addresses this problem.
The deal was applauded by at least one Tangosol competitor, Appistry, which
also makes a data grid product.
“It represents a strong vote of confidence in an emerging technology
approach pioneered by companies like Tangosol, Appistry and others — one that dramatically simplifies the process of developing agile, scalable
applications,” Appistry CEO Kevin Haar said in a statement sent to
internetnews.com.
“When a large, incumbent vendor like Oracle not only takes notice, but takes
action, it’s a clear indication that a sea change is occurring and that an
early adopter market is starting to ‘cross the chasm.'”
Oracle, which expects to seal the deal for Tangosol next month, will tuck
Coherence Data Grid into its Fusion Middleware to complement the Oracle
Database family, which includes Oracle RAC, Oracle TimesTen for in-memory
relational database access and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition for
disk-based cache overflow.
Together, Oracle expects the products will deliver customers “mainframe
quality of service using a lower cost grid infrastructure.”
The Tangosol transaction was triggered three weeks after Oracle bid $3.3 billion for business intelligence software power Hyperion.
Oracle Takes to Tangosol
