Oracle floats CRM on Amazon boxes

A raft of major Oracle applications can now be run in Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist Jeff Barr announced Friday.

Applications include Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM system, JD Edwards Enterprise One ERP and Oracle's E-Business Suite, adding to the availability on EC2 of its Database 11g.

Oracle has agreed to provide support for its customers that operate in EC2, while Barr noted that customers need not purchase additional licenses.

"Customers with active Oracle Support and Amazon Premium Support will be able to contact either Amazon or Oracle for support," wrote Barr.

Applications include:

• Oracle PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 PeopleTools
• Oracle PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 Database
• Oracle PeopleSoft ELM 9.1 PeopleTools
• Oracle PeopleSoft ELM 9.1 Database
• Oracle PeopleSoft FSCM 9.1 PeopleTools
• Oracle PeopleSoft FSCM 9.1 Database
• Oracle PeopleSoft PS 9.1 PeopleTools
• Oracle PeopleSoft PS 9.1 Database
• Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 App Tier
• Oracle-E-Business-Suite-12.1.3-DB
• JD Edwards Enterprise One - ORCLVMDB
• JD Edwards Enterprise One - ORCLVMHTML
• JD Edwards Enterprise One - ORCLVMENT

The announcement came just weeks after Salesforce.com announced it would crash Oracle's traditional stomping ground with Database.com.

Besides the war for cloud customers, Oracle boss Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff's were in a verbal scuffle over the semantics of cloud computing.

After Benioff publicly mocked Ellison's objection to the term "cloud", Ellison fired back that the cloud was just networked "boxes".

"Salesforce.com runs on 1500 Dell services - which are boxes," said Ellison.

"A cloud is a lot of computers on the network. I am sure when Marc [Benioff] gets back and talks to his technical people, they will let him know that you do need boxes. You really do."

Oracle's AWS release did not include Siebel CRM which it already offered in an On Demand version.

Microsoft earlier this month announced it would offer US$200 per seat for every Oracle Siebel CRM and Salesforce.com seat lured to its Dynamics Online CRM 2011, set to be launched in January.