Oracle is buying Wercker, a small Dutch company established to help developers build and update software fast using containers, a modern form of software development that is all the rage among tech companies.
The news, without any financial details, was disclosed in a blog post by Wercker founder and chief executive Micha Hernandez van Leuffen on Monday.
Database maker Oracle is pushing into the cloud to compete with companies like Salesforce (CRM), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon Web Services across different segments of the market.
As Hernandez van Leuffen wrote:
A leading cloud needs great tooling and adding Wercker’s container life-cycle management to Oracle’s Cloud provides engineering teams with the developer experience they deserve to build, launch and scale their applications.
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Wercker—and rivals like CloudBees and CircleCI—promise to let developers incorporate new features into their software quickly, an important consideration now that every company from banks to retailers know they need to update both customer- and employee-facing applications all the time.
One advantage of using containers is that the resulting applications can run either in a third-party cloud, like AWS, or a company’s own internal data centers. That’s an attractive proposition for companies that want as many deployment options as possible.
This acquisition is all about attracting software developers, who are integral to the success of any cloud. AWS started building its nearly $14-billion-a-year cloud juggernaut by appealing to developers at startups and small companies, and from there selling more into larger companies.
Wercker, founded in 2012 and based in Amsterdam, had raised about $7.5 million in venture capital to date from INKEF Capital and others.