Database giant Oracle acquired Xsigio today for an undisclosed amount. The firm offers software-defined networking solutions that will be coupled with Oracle VM, according to a release that went out this morning.

Xsigo’s product line-up covers both hardware and software, but it’s the latter category that Oracle is more interested in. The company’s technology visualizes data center network environments to achieve the same goal as server virtualization: reducing complexity and costs by facilitating easier resource allocation.

“While it is quite different from the new generation of SDN offerings, Xsigo’s virtualization, networking and management technologies are a good fit for the Oracle portfolio.” says Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “With Xsigo, Oracle is doubling down on appliance based solutions for high performance environments that use InfiniBand and high speed Ethernet technologies.”

Xsigo lists hundreds of big-name customers in its portfolio, including British Telecom, eBay, Softbank and Verizon. Just last month the vendor introduced Data Center Fabric. It’s touted as the “throughput and lowest latency” with up to 112Gbps of bandwidth per box, and includes a lot of added agility in the form of remote maintenance and a strong SDN element: being able to scale up and down more easily than in traditional environments is one of the main pros.

While Xsigo has been working on expanding its offering Oracle was busy doing some non-organic growth. Less than two weeks ago it acquired Skire, a maker of niche software for facility and capital management. Terms if that deal weren’t disclosed either.

Also quite recently, Oracle rolled out the second version of the platform that powers its Exalogic appliance. The big improvement is a broader emphasis on virtualization with Oracle VM integration and other tweaks including what is reportedly a 1000 percent performance boost.