Microsoft To Support Oracle On Azure Cloud

Microsoft and Oracle have confirmed that the two rivals are working together in the cloud. Oracle’s database will be available and supported on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation platform, as well as  the Microsoft Azure cloud service – alongside the competing Microsoft SQL Server.

The announcement, made yesterday in a California-time conference call, laid out terms of an agreement to support Oracle’s database and middleware on Microsoft Azure and on the Hyper-V virtualisation system which underpins it.

The two companies have, of course, always co-operated behind the scenes, and they will also continue to compete as Oracle will continue with its own hypervisor and cloud.

Behind the scenes is not enough

“In the world of cloud computing, I think behind-the-scenes collaboration is not enough,” said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer (pictured) on the conference call with Oracle’s Mark Hurd (further down the page).

To allow the Oracle database to run, Microsoft will offer Oracle’s Java  and WebLogic middleware on Hyper-V. Until now, the Oracle software has had to run on bare-metal Windows machines, limiting it to old-fashioned installations at Microsoft-based IT departments.

Oracle’s 12c database is optimised for virtualisation and the cloud, and is presumably covered by the agreement, although the two companies did not specify it in their announcement.

The announcement should allow Oracle to address more customers. Oracle has its own VM virtualastion plattform, based on the open source Xen hypervisor, but Microsoft’s Hyper-V is doing best against the market leader VMware. While VMware is reported to run on more than half the virtualised x86 chips out there, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is apparently pushing towards a one-third share.

Meanwhile, the deal should also help make Microsoft’s Azure look a lot more serious as a cloud platform. It is lagging the leader, Amazon Web Services, which has supported Oracle databases for a long while.

As another enabler to the deal, Oracle’s own Linux version will be supported runs on Azure, which is very much a Windows-centric cloud. It’s not the first Linux in there – Microsoft already supports its favourite SUSE and the market leader Ubuntu.

Oracle and Microsoft have been rivals for a very long while, and Microsoft usually positions SQL Server as a strong low-cost alternative to Oracle. Ballmer emphasised that the competition will continue, in the call:  “A lot has happened, but we are going to continue to compete in areas.”

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