Oracle to announce pact with Microsoft, NetSuite and Salesforce

Oracle is expected to launch a slew of partnerships to ensure the success of its 12c database among cloud companies.

Oracle chief, Larry Ellison, announced during the company's dismal fourth quarter earnings call yesterday that Oracle would be forming alliances with NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and possibly others.

"Next week, we will be announcing technology partnerships with the most important – the largest and most important SaaS companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud. And they will be using our technology, committing to our technology for years to come," Ellison said on the call responding to a question from an analyst about Oracle's upcoming multi-tenant 12c database.

"These partnerships in the cloud I think will reshape the cloud and reshape the perception of Oracle Technology in the cloud. 12c in other words is the most important technology we've ever developed for this new generation of cloud security."

According to Jack Clark writing in The Register, while NetSuite and Salesforce were major Oracle customers, the real interesting part was the pact with Oracle's nemesis Microsoft.

For Oracle, whose revenues 2012 revenues of $35.6 billion, are less than half of Microsoft's $73.7 billion (see table at the bottom), the partnership could involve Oracle 12c becoming available on Windows Azure, which would be momentous, given the heavy investment in SQL Server by Microsoft.

Both Salesforce (2012 revenue $3.05 billion) and NetSuite ($308 million) already run on Oracle databases and other software. According to The New York Times, Salesforce.com could be announcing a wide-ranging data portability agreement with Oracle that could see easy data migration between the two companies' human-capital management suites.

Industry experts expect the Salesforce.com pact to involve wide-ranging data portability agreement with Oracle to allow easy data migration between the human-capital management suites of the two companies .

Microsoft would be holding a press conference on Monday where Oracle co-president Mark Hurd, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer and server and tools head Satya Nadella would be present, signifying that the announcement would be big, and involve server infrastructure.

According to The Register, the most likely component of the announcement would be 12c on Azure. At present, Oracle's database is not offered within its cloud unlike rival Amazon Web Services which has been offering 11g since 2011.

Since Azure infrastructure-as-a-service became generally available in April, Microsoft has been pushing for developing capabilities of its cloud which meant partnerships.

According to Ellison, the startling series of announcements with companies like Saleforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft would come next week.

Though both NetSuite and Salesforce.com already ran on Oracle databases and other software, they also competed with Oracle for CRM and ERP workloads and there was much controversy last year when Oracle cancelled an Oracle OpenWorld keynote by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Microsoft's SQL Server franchise, however, was a major Oracle database competitor, with SQL Server leading the market in terms of database units shipped. Oracle remained the market leader in databases based on revenue.

According to analysts all the companies were facing a growing threat from Amazon Web Services, which was siphoning away workloads that used to run on their technology.

They speculate that Microsoft and Oracle, in particular, could team in a competitive alliance. Also the two companies, both of which competed with VMware might strike up a big data alliance to array against Pivotal, the big data spin off of EMC and VMware.