Oracle Forges Cloud Partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce.com

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle has announced new partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce.com. (Photo: Oracle Corp.)

In a series of announcements this week Oracle (ORCL) announced strategic partnership agreements with Microsoft and Salesforce.com. The enterprise hardware and software giant also made a move recently to change its stock listing to the New York Stock Exchange - the largest exchange transfer, at $156.4 billion in market capitalization.

Microsoft

Oracle and Microsoft (MSFT) announced a partnership that will enable customers to run Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure. Customers will be able to deploy Oracle software — including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server — on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and receive full support from Oracle.

"Microsoft is deeply committed to giving businesses what they need, and clearly that is the ability to run enterprise workloads in private clouds, public clouds and, increasingly, across both,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “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.”

“Our customers’ IT environments are changing rapidly to meet the dynamic nature of the world today,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd. “At Oracle, we are committed to providing greater choice and flexibility to customers by providing multiple deployment options for our software, including on-premise as well as public, private, and hybrid clouds. This collaboration with Microsoft extends our partnership and is important for the benefit of our customers.”

Salesforce.com

Oracle and Salesforce.com (CRM) announced a comprehensive nine-year partnership encompassing all three tiers of cloud computing: Applications, Platform and Infrastructure. Salesforce.com had long run on Oracle software, but the move to Oracle hardware was a major move for the company.  The company plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database, and Java Middleware Platform. In turn, Oracle will integrate salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company.

“Larry and I both agree that salesforce.com and Oracle need to integrate our clouds,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com's CRM integrated with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud is the best of both worlds: the simplicity of salesforce.com combined with the power of Oracle.”

“We are looking forward to working with salesforce.com to integrate our cloud with theirs,” said Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle. “When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box – even when the applications are from different vendors. That’s why Marc and I believe it’s important that our two companies work together to make it happen, and integrate the salesforce.com and Oracle Clouds.”