Oracle and Microsoft join forces to take on cloud rivals

Microsoft and Oracle today announced a cooperation deal that will see Oracle certify and support Java, Oracle Database and WebLogic Server on both Microsoft's Windows Server Hyper-V and its Azure platforms.

Licenses for Oracle software will from today permit mobility from approved hardware onto Windows Azure, as it already offers customers migrating to AWS. Microsoft aims to soon offer IaaS instances on Azure with templated Oracle configurations.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said the deal gave both company's customers the ability to run enterprise workloads in private and public clouds.

“Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years,” Ballmer said.

Oracle and Microsoft's cloud offerings are in competition with Amazon Web Services and Google's Compute Engine, and are a struggling to catch up as their competitors increasingly capture the enterprise market.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said the deal would give Azure customers more deployment options, but also allowed Microsoft to use the Oracle tech stack.

"We would not be surprised if Dynamics apps will run Oracle under the hood in the near future. Oracle is true to it’s technology partner DNA from early RDBMS days. And Oracle is good at supporting partners – which the track record of SAP running on Oracle proves."

He added that it looked like Microsoft had reached the end of the road with the scalability of MS SQL Server, with the partnership addressing some of those concerns for Microsoft.

"But mixing a technology stack is not an easy operation and the question is why would a high performance seeking cloud prospective customer look at Azure in the first place – if they could go to Oracle anyway."

Terms and the value of the deal were not disclosed by either party.