Oracle Announces Support for the Azure Cloud

By Joe Casad

Java, WebLogic, and other tools will receive official Oracle support in Microsoft's expanding cloud empire.

Oracle and Microsoft have announced a partnership that will bring Oracle software to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud and the Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization environment. Under the terms of the agreement, Azure and Hyper-V users will have the option of official Oracle support for software products such as Java, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Oracle Linux.
According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, "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, both. "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."
Official support for these popular Oracle software products lends credibility to Microsoft's efforts to present Azure as an enterprise-ready cloud alternative. From Oracle's viewpoint, the new agreement can only lead to new customers and a new channel for selling their support services. Additional terms of the contract were not specified.

07/08/2013