Oracle buys up another software company

Oracle has continued on its acquisition frenzy picking up another company, Virtual Iron Software.

Virtual Iron provides server virtualisation management software and its acquisition by cheque book happy Oracle will fuel the rumours that its goal is software, not hardware.

Oracle bought Sun in April for $7.4 billion after talks between Sun and IBM fell at the last hurdle, but a filing disclosed this week showed Oracle was originally only after Sun's software.

Chief executive of Oracle, Larry Ellison, said earlier this month that Sun's hardware was not under threat and both the hardware and its engineers would be kept on board.

This latest buy is unlikely to prompt such negative responses as its purchase of Sun, with shareholders taking out class actions to try and stop the process.

The deal between Oracle and Virtual Iron is due to be completed this summer and financial details were not revealed.

See what industry experts thought about the Sun/Oracle deal here.

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.