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Oracle is embracing cloud computing with its support for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud environment.
The move, announced Sept. 22 at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, will benefit both companies as enterprises look to the cloud for more services.
Right now, Oracle plans to allow customers to license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware to run on EC2. To help enterprises deploy its products on EC2 quickly, Oracle is delivering a set of free AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) with which virtual machines can be provisioned with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
The software vendor is also delivering a cloud-based backup solution called Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module. The backup offering allows customers to use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as a database backup destination. In addition, the Oracle and Amazon.com are working on solutions that will enable cost-effective, high-volume backups and restorations in environments with limited network-bandwidth by means of physical import and export, according to Oracle.
Taking all these things in combination, Oracle is going full steam ahead with cloud computing at a time when database rival Microsoft is pursuing a cloud strategy of its own.
“Oracle has allowed customers to access applications that Oracle hosts for some time, such as Siebel and PeopleSoft,” said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. “What we’ve found is that this allows customers to take advantage of Oracle technology and expertise and have a less disruptive upgrade cycle. It makes sense to extend that to the middleware layer, given Oracle’s strategy to integrate business processes and applications through the middleware layer.”
For Amazon.com, Oracle’s move gives AWS customers the ability to leverage a well-known database. AWS customers also get access to a number of tools to help them build enterprise applications to run in the cloud. In addition, Oracle Unbreakable Linux support and Amazon Premium support are available for Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2.
“For the first time, customers who want to run Oracle’s industry-leading software to develop and deploy new, innovative applications in the cloud can do so with Oracle running on AWS (Amazon Web Services),” Adam Selipsky, AWS vice president of product management and developer relations, said in a statement.