Mega-corp Oracle to acquire South African enterprise cloud startup Nimbula

American-based enterprise software titan, Oracle, will acquire South African startup, Nimbula, for an undisclosed sum of money.

In an official blog post, the enterprise software maker said that it has agreed to buy Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software, in a bid to strengthen its own cloud offerings.

Prior to the announcement, there had been speculation that the deal was going through in order to give Oracle a means of joining OpenStack, the open cloud organisation that Nimbula participates in as a member. Heavy hitters such as Intel, Dell, HP and IBM are part of the OpenStack project.

Nimbula describes itself as a “cloud computing company that delivers a new class of cloud infrastructure software for building Amazon EC2-like private, hybrid or public cloud.” The mention of EC2 is intentional as Nimbula’s South African founders Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon were involved in building EC2, the cloud-computing platform that forms parts of Amazon Web Services.

Oracle says that Nimbula’s product is complementary to its own, and is expected to be integrated with its cloud offerings. Oracle expects the Nimbula transaction to close in the first half of 2013.

The news comes hot on the heels of Amazon’s announcement that it will be offering virtual private cloud hosting, especially useful in enterprise scenarios.

With the Nimbula deal, Oracle’s spending spree continues. Oracle recently announced its intention to acquire Acme Packet for $2.1 billion, and 2011 saw Oracle announce intentions to pruchase 11 companies.