Oracle Acquires Cloud Access Security Brokerage Startup Palerra

Oracle is the latest big-name vendor to invest in the cloud access security brokerage market, saying Sunday at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco that it had acquired Palerra as it sets its sights on growing its cloud business in a big way.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Palerra offers Loric, a security platform that aims to help enterprises automate the process of threat detection, incident response, analytics and more around cloud and Software-as-a-Service offerings, such as Amazon Web Services, Office 365 and Salesforce.

[Related: Oracle Introduces Its First MSP Program Ahead Of OpenWorld]

In a letter to customers and partners about the deal, Oracle Senior Vice President of Identity Management and Security Products Peter Barker said the Palerra acquisition will extend the security capabilities of Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service.

’Together, Oracle and Palerra will help accelerate cloud adoption securely by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services. The combination of Oracle Identity Cloud Service and Palerra’s CASB solution plan to deliver comprehensive protection for users, applications and APIs, data, and infrastructure to secure customer adoption of cloud,’ Barker said.

Darren Calman, vice president of business development at Simeio Solutions, an Atlanta-based Oracle and Palerra partner, said the acquisition is ’definitely good’ for the two companies and for Simeio. Calman said he already works with a couple of customers using both Oracle and Palerra offerings and the technologies are a ’good fit,’ particularly around Oracle’s anticipated Identity-as-a-Service offering.

’From my perspective, it’s very promising for Oracle and Palerra. For our customers, it gives us some more stuff to offer to them,’ Calman said.

The acquisition is part of a big push by Oracle, which the company outlined at its OpenWorld 2016 conference Sunday. In a keynote address at the event, co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said the ’lead is over’ for Amazon Web Services in the cloud, saying the company can expect ’serious competition’ from Oracle going forward. Security will be key to that cloud push, Ellison said in the keynote, saying it "might be the single most important issue in migrating from our on-premise data centers to cloud data centers.’

Simeio’s Calman said the acquisition of Palerra is a key piece in that push to the cloud for Oracle, as it provides them another way to secure the offerings it is launching in that area.

’It reinforces Oracle’s commitment to the space, to the cloud space and security space,’ Calman said.

In addition to the acquisition of Palerra, Oracle unveiled multiple new Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings at the event, including a Container Cloud Service, Oracle Identity Cloud Service, Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service, Big Data Cloud Services and Oracle Analytics Cloud Services. Oracle also unveiled the launch of its first MSP program, called the Oracle Cloud Managed Services Provider Program, and named 13 global systems integrators that have made deep investments in Oracle's expanding cloud portfolio as inaugural partners.

Barker said Palerra and Oracle will continue to operate independently until the deal is closed. He said the Palerra team is expected to join Oracle, including co-founder and CEO Rohit Gupta and co-founder and CTO Ganesh Kirti, both of whom are Oracle veterans.

Oracle said Palerra partners should continue to work with their current Palerra channel contacts until they receive communication otherwise. It said Oracle partners should also work through their existing contacts.

In a blog post about the acquisition, Gupta said the deal signals a ’new beginning’ for Palerra and will allow the company to ’continue our entrepreneurial spirit at a much greater scale.’ That innovation is more important than ever, Gupta said, as there is a ’dramatic expansion’ of cloud in the enterprise, growth that is driving the acceleration of the cloud access security brokerage market in which Palerra participates.

’Modern enterprises expect to get better visibility, achieve rapid value, and deliver peace of mind to their end users who access their cloud applications, while making it a seamless and secure user experience. Palerra has been a pioneer in this new generation of CASB, with a focus on protecting both information and infrastructure in the cloud,’ Gupta said.

The market is one of the hottest areas in cloud security, expected to reach $7.51 billion by 2020, up from $3.34 billion in 2015, according to research firm Markets and Markets.

Palerra is the latest cloud access security broker to get picked up by a big-name vendor, following on the heels of Cisco’s acquisition of CloudLock in June, Microsoft’s acquisition of Adallom in September 2015, Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of CirroSecure in May 2015, and Blue Coat Systems’ acquisition of Perspecsys in July 2015 and Elastica in November 2015.