Oracle Hires Engineering Team from Shuttered Cloud Startup Nebula

Oracle (ORCL) reportedly has hired some 40 engineers formerly employed by Nebula, a four-year old cloud computing startup that abruptly closed its doors last month.

The new hires will join Oracle’s cloud computing unit headed by Peter Magnusson, Oracle cloud development senior vice president, Re/code reported. Magnusson, a former Google (GOOG) engineering executive, is only eight months on the job, joining Oracle last October from Snapchat to build a team for the vendor’s Cloud Platform. He tweated a welcoming message to the Nebula team late last week.

Word of the engineering personnel additions came on the heels of Oracle co-chief executive Mark Hurd’s reveal last week that the vendor expects to have at least 95 percent of its products available in the cloud by this October to coincide with its OpenWorld conference. Right now, about 65 percent of Oracle’s products, services and applications are cloud-enabled.

Nebula officially ceased operations on April 1 and Magnusson apparently huddled with the Nebula engineering unit soon after, offering employment to about 90 percent of the group, Re/code reported. The former Nebula engineers will be working on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure service, the report said.

“When we compared notes on what they were working on and what we’re working on, it was an easy decision to hire them,” Magnusson reportedly said. “We want some good cloud engineers and it is hard to find people with solid experience working on distributed systems who have the chops to build clouds for the enterprise.”

Nebula, which maintained operations in Seattle and Mountain View, CA, raised at least $38.5 million in four rounds of funding from eight investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital and Comcast Ventures, according to Crunchbase. This time last year, Nebula secured $3.5 million in debt financing, preceded by an undisclosed infusion from Webb Investment Network in July, 2013 and $25 million in Series B funding in September, 2012. Its $10 million in Series A funding occurred in May, 2011.

Nebula, whose platform was based on the open source cloud operating system OpenStack, developed a hardware appliance called Nebula One to enable businesses to cost-effectively build internal, private clouds from groups of servers. Lockheed Martin, Genentech and the Xerox PARC research lab were early customers.

In a message posted on its website, Nebula said it attempted to “usher in a new era of cloud computing by curating and productizing OpenStack for the enterprise. We are incredibly proud of the role we had in establishing Nebula as the leading enterprise cloud computing platform. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait.”