Bitter rivals join hands for cloud computing

In a major reversal of strategy, Oracle Corp., the technology giant that sells software via the Web, has teamed up with Salesforce.com, its fierce competitor in the cloud-based customer relationship software market. This is Oracle’s second successive high-profile deal within a short span of time, after it announced an alliance with long time foe Microsoft on June 24. Under the terms of the Oracle-Salersforce deal, Salesforce software will run on Oracle’s Linux (previously Salesforce used Red Hat Linux) and its cloud based applications will support Exadata hardware. The partnership is also expected to ensure tighter integration between Oracle and Salesforce clouds, which will help customers to easily move their data between the two platforms. Oracle is looking to accelerate growth by expanding sales of cloud-computing products, one of the few fast-growing areas in the technology sector. The partnerships with Salesforce and Microsoft are expected to provide a significant boost to Oracle’s cloud-computing endeavors and will add to Oracle’s competitive strength against established players such as SAP and Amazon.com as well as against new entrants such as Workday, VMware and Google.