Maureen O'Gara

Oracle has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, the Platform-as-a-Service company with the cloud development platform that supports the Ruby, PHP and Node.js development languages.

The exact sum, position and valuation went unmentioned. Engine Yard will continue to operate as an independent company.

Ironically Amazon was part of a $15 million B round in 2008 and a $19 C round in 2009. Prior to the Oracle, Engine Yard is understood to have raised $37.5 million.

The investment means that Oracle and Engine Yard will connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment. Developers are supposed to be able to extend their packaged applications more efficiently to support additional business requirements and test, prototype and deploy new purpose-built apps without having to assemble and maintain the infrastructure.

Thomas Kurian, executive vice-president, Oracle Development, said "Developers building new web applications in Ruby, PHP and Node.js to meet growing demands associated with mobile and social computing need a robust web PaaS offering. We are looking forward to integrating the Oracle Cloud with Engine Yard's platform to further extend our PaaS capabilities for web application development."

Engine Yard CEO John Dillon said, "Oracle's global scale and resources partnered with our deep expertise in deploying web-scale applications will provide enterprises with a complete and trusted application platform that enables them to easily leverage the power of the cloud."