Rivals Microsoft, Oracle look to reap peace dividend with cloud partnership

After the expectations last week of some dramatic announcements between Oracle and Microsoft, fuelled by tantalising hints by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his company's dismal fourth quarter earnings call on 21 June, what was actually announced yesterday may be regarded as a letdown for many (See: Oracle to announce pact with Microsoft, NetSuite and Salesforce).

Oracle will not shut its public cloud and move customers to Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services, but now customers using Oracle's 11g and 12c databases and WebLogic middleware would be able to deploy those database and middleware programmes on top of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, which  has a 30-per cent market share among x86 server virtualisation hypervisors as against about 52 per cent for VMware's ESXi.

Oracle's databases had long been certified to run atop bare-metal servers running current and past Windows Server versions, and though technically they could be got to work atop Hyper-V, that was not the same thing as having Oracle support behind running Oracle 11g or WebLogic Server on top of that hypervisor, writes Timothy Pickett Morgan of The Register.

Given that enterprises were extremely conservative when it came to the databases and middleware that were, for all intent and purposes, their core back-end applications, so not having support for Hyper-V was a big deal.

The partnership, however, seems to be a good move for both companies, while being bad for mutual competitor VMware, according to veteran Microsoft and Oracle analyst Rick Sherlund, of investment bank Nomura, The Seattle Times reported.

In the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were bitter rivals, competing over providing database and server products and sniping at each other over the US government's antitrust suit against Microsoft.

Now they had joined hands and were looking to the future together.

The cloud partnership they announced would allow customers to run Oracle software (including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server) on Microsoft's Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure. Certification and full support would be provided by Oracle.

Windows Azure customers would also get Oracle Linux.

''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,'' Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

Many customers run Oracle software on their on-premises Windows Server and according to Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, speaking in a conference call following the announcement, the announcement was about extending that to the cloud.