For some time, Oracle has made it clear it intends to challenge Amazon Web Services’ place at the top of the cloud services heap. The company underscored those ambitions during yesterday’s kickoff of its OpenWorld convention in San Francisco, announcing acquisition of cloud security startup Palerra for an undisclosed amount.
In his opening keynote at the conference, executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison (pictured above), called the Palerra deal a “very important acquisition.” He added that Oracle plans to continue expanding its cloud services portfolio to take a lead in the “new era of utility computing.”
Founded in 2013, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palerra claims to be the first cloud access security broker (CASB) to “automate the entire security lifecycle, from threat detection to remediation, in order to effectively combat cybercrime and keep enterprises secure.” Palerra’s flagship product, LORIC, provides enterprise 
customers with a unified platform for managing security across their entire cloud footprints.
Ellison: ‘We’ll Keep Building’
During his presentation, Ellison said the growth of utility computing is bringing “breathtaking change” to the information technology industry. He said that Oracle aims to dramatically boost its presence in that area to challenge its two key competitors, Amazon and Workday.
“This year, and this coming year, you’ll see us aggressively moving into infrastructure as a service,” Ellison said. “We’ll keep building, and when we find a supplier who’s done some innovative and important work, we’ll buy them.”
Oracle and Palerra will help companies securely adopt cloud computing cloud by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services, Palerra co-founder and CEO Rohit Gupta wrote yesterday in a blog post on his company’s Web site.
“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,” he said.
‘Amazon’s Lead is Over’
Declaring that “Amazon’s lead is over,” Ellison unveiled a number of new cloud-based offerings, including database as a service and Oracle Analytics Cloud. Among the other new services announced were a container cloud service, an API (application program interface) cloud service, enhanced mobile cloud services with support for chatbots and Internet of Things applications.
“Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward,” Ellison said. “Our new second-generation datacenters offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, four times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon.”
In its FAQ about the Palerra acquisition, Oracle said the combination of the two companies’ technologies is aimed at speeding up enterprise adoption of cloud services.
“As companies continue to move sensitive data to the cloud, it has become increasingly important for companies to re-evaluate their security architecture,” according to the FAQ. “Together, Oracle and Palerra will help accelerate cloud adoption securely by providing comprehensive identity and security cloud services.”
Palerra’s customers include BMC Software, which uses LORIC to monitor cloud services such as Amazon, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, and the investment banking firm Jefferies, which turned to Palerra for help managing its risk and compliance requirements in the cloud.
