“I can’t tell you how excited I was to get the call to come speak here,” said Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for cloud and enterprise engineering, Tuesday as he faced the Oracle OpenWorld audience filled with several thousand potential Windows Azure cloud users. No Microsoft executive had ever made an OpenWorld keynote before.
Oracle and Microsoft, for the last decade, have bitterly vied to see which would be the dominant database on Windows: Oracle or SQL Server. The stakes grew higher as Windows Server became more strongly entrenched in the enterprise data center. At some point, both decided neither was ever going to own the market outright.
At the same time, the rise of Amazon Web Services showed what had been brewing while they grappled with each other. If some database users were finding a home on AWS, they potentially weren’t using either Oracle or SQL Server. It might just be time for a strategic re-alignment.
The two companies announced June 24 that Microsoft would make it simple to run the Oracle database system, Java, and WebLogic Server on its Azure cloud. If customers did so, they would still be entitled to receive support from Oracle under the new partnership agreement.