Virtual Iron Has Been Acquired by Oracle
About Virtual Iron
- Virtual Iron, a privately-held company based in Lowell, Massachusetts, was a provider of server virtualization management software that enabled dynamic resource and capacity management
- The company’s server virtualization platform was based on the Xen open source hypervisor, and had comparable capabilities to VMware without the cost or complexity
- The company had 75 employees and was backed by Goldman Sachs Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners and SAP Ventures
About Oracle
- Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) develops, manufactures, markets, distributes and services database and middleware software as well as applications software designed to help companies manage and grow their business operations
- With over 84,000 employees at the time of the acquisition and the world’s largest corporations as customers, Oracle is the world’s largest enterprise software company
- Oracle uses a very active acquisition program as a major component of the company’s corporate growth strategy
Transaction Notes
- The acquisition of Virtual Iron by Oracle was announced on May 13, 2009; financial terms were not disclosed
- Virtual Iron’s technology in combination with Oracle VM’s scalable, high performance and highly available server virtualization product is expected to provide more comprehensive and dynamic resource management across the full software stack
- The Virtual Iron acquisition will complement the virtualization technologies that Oracle will gain through the pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems
- Shea & Company served as the exclusive financial advisor to Virtual Iron in the company’s sale to Oracle