Oracle continued its acquisition spree today with the purchase of service availability software vendor GoAhead. GoAhead offers a commercial distribution of OpenWAF, a Service Availability Forum compliant middleware stack for assuring carrier-grade availability for the communications industry.

“NEPs [Network Equipment Providers] are moving to a standardized software and hardware platform that can deliver and manage highly available services,” VP of Oracle Communications Industry Solution Nigel Ball was quoted saying. “The addition of GoAhead technology will help us deliver a comprehensive, standards-based, carrier-grade platform that supports the delivery of new services in the call path of the network.”

In July Oracle acquired Ksplice, a company that sold a solution for admins to update Linux servers without taking them offline. Ksplice’s now integrates with Oracle Linux Premier Support.

Oracle has acquired several other companies this year, including Pillar Systems, FatWire and InQuira.

Services Angle

Major outages at Amazon Web Services at Microsoft BPOS/365 have raised serious questions about cloud availability. The acquisitions of GoAhead and Ksplice demonstrate that Oracle is prioritizing high availability in its infrastructure products,  in contrast to the service providers that make uptime a priority but consider latency as the most pressing issue to resolve.