Ravello Systems

Ravello Systems was established in 2011 by co-founders Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, both of whom had a track record of successful ventures in the tech industry. Their previous experience includes the co-founding of Qumranet, a company focused on desktop virtualization which was acquired by Red Hat, and Pentacom, a developer of core-routing systems sold to Cisco. This background in virtualization and networking directly informed the development of Ravello's core technology.

The company developed a nested virtualization platform that allowed enterprises to run their existing VMware and KVM-based data center workloads on public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform without any modifications. Ravello's technology, HVX, essentially encapsulated a whole multi-VM application, complete with its networking and storage configurations, and enabled it to run on a different cloud environment. This addressed a significant challenge for businesses looking to migrate to the cloud, as it eliminated the need for costly and time-consuming application rewrites or network reconfigurations. The primary clients for this service were enterprises seeking to leverage the public cloud for development, testing, training, and sales demonstration environments.

The business model centered on providing this cloud migration and testing capability as a service, with customers paying based on their usage. This approach provided a flexible and cost-effective way for companies to create replicas of their production environments in the public cloud. In 2016, Oracle recognized the strategic value of Ravello's technology and acquired the company for a reported $500 million. Following the acquisition, Ravello Systems was integrated into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and its technology was used to enhance Oracle's cloud offerings. As of 2019, Oracle announced the discontinuation of the original Ravello service as it was fully incorporated into OCI's native services, marking the final chapter of the company's independent journey.

Keywords: nested virtualization, cloud migration, enterprise software, HVX, dev/test environments, multi-cloud, application mobility, data center replication, infrastructure-as-a-service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure