Roundup: Oracle, Freescale, Juniper

Here’s our review of today’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Oracle acquires Taleo. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation (TLEO), a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion. Taleo’s Talent Management Cloud helps organizations attract, develop, motivate and retain workers to improve performance and drive growth. The acquisition keeps Oracle on track for moving applications to the cloud, and continues to intensify their competition with rival SAP. In the last half of 2011 Oracle made another large purchase in the web based customer service sector withe the $1.43 billion acquisition of RightNow Technologies.  “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Freescale targets the data center with embedded multicore processors. Freescale Semiconductor (FSL) is taking aim at cloud computing and the data center market with the announcement of its T4240 and T4160 embedded multicore processors from its QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series. The T4240 processor has achieved the highest CoreMark benchmark performance-per-watt profile and overall performance score ever recorded for an embedded processor. The new T4160 features 16 virtual cores and has achieved 1.8GHz within a 25 watt power envelope. Both processors deliver a combination of hardware acceleration, fabric-based interconnect technology, high speed I/O, hardware-assisted virtualization and next-generation 64-bit Power Architecture cores for applications in the data center, as well as other networking and industrial segments. “Data center technology is evolving at remarkable speed, and many of our customers are rapidly adding bandwidth while battling latency by flattening the data center network,” said Brett Butler, vice president of Freescale’s Networking Processor Division. “Interestingly, the data center of the future is beginning to mirror the architecture of our embedded SoCs, driven by the same requirement to deliver the highest network and content processing performance at the lowest cost of ownership. The technology demands associated with this trend are Freescale’s traditional communications processing strengths.”

Juniper introduces Universal Access Solution.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) introduced its Universal Access solution that is designed to support more mobile calls and transactions with fewer dropped calls, while also improving network utilization and revenue opportunities for service providers. The new solution enables service providers to converge wired and wireless network access to deliver a superior subscriber experience while lowering the total cost of operating, maintaining and updating the network infrastructure. "It is clear from our recent research that Ethernet and MPLS are favored by mobile operators as primary cell site backhaul connection protocols, said Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst, Infonetics Research.  "This means that the new Juniper ACX Series with support for both Ethernet access/aggregation and MPLS should be appealing to operators. I'm sure many operators will want to evaluate the ACX Series' option of seamless MPLS for simplifying core through access operations, as well as the integrated timing/synchronization manager, and the new network management/analysis tools based on Junos Space."