Oracle takes stake in PaaS vendor Engine Yard

IDG News Service - Oracle has taken a minority stake in Engine Yard, maker of a PaaS (platform as a service) for Ruby, PHP and Node.js applications, the company announced Tuesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Oracle and Engine Yard "are expected to connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment," according to a statement.

Engine Yard will remain an independent company, Oracle said.

Oracle's move is meant to give users of its recently announced Oracle Cloud PaaS, which offers the ability to write and deploy Java EE-based applications, more development options, particularly for Web applications rather than heavier-duty enterprise applications for which Java EE is often used.

The move is good for Engine Yard and its customers, CEO John Dillon said in a blog post on Tuesday.

"This is a great day for our organization and for our customers," he wrote. "The resulting partnership with Oracle will give Engine Yard access to new technologies and allow us to increase the technical investment we make in our products."

Oracle may also have been interested in investing in Engine Yard because of its broad partner ecosystem. Engine Yard customers can tap a wide variety of "Add-On" platform services from partners, such as application monitoring, continuous integration and recurring billing.

It wasn't immediately clear Tuesday when the integration between Oracle's PaaS and Engine Yard would be completed, nor whether Oracle may some day seek to acquire Engine Yard.

While Oracle is well-known for its long run of acquisitions, it has also taken partial stakes in companies before, such as its 2010 investment in Infiniband vendor Mellanox.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com