Tech giants Verizon and Oracle have announced a partnership whereby customers can use Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware on Verizon’s cloud.
“This deal represents two market leaders coming together to create a compelling cloud offering that will help enterprises succeed in a highly competitive market environment,” Oracle president Mark Hurd trumpeted in a statement.
He added: “Combining Verizon’s unique enterprise experience and capabilities with Oracle’s best in class cloud products will provide customers another easy and cost-effective choice for embracing the cloud.”
Big words, yes, but what are the facts behind it? It’s worth noting that Verizon Cloud is currently in beta, with the service announced only in October. There’s also no information on when Verizon’s solution will hit full release, but with the latest announcement covering software as a service via Oracle, it’s certainly an interesting proposition.
More than anything, this represents further willingness from Oracle to cooperate in order to climb the cloudy rankings, going via a service provider rather than through software licensing. Given its proposition, as Forbes noted, of being the only enterprise tech company with fingers in the SaaS, IaaS and PaaS pies, Big Red is in the peculiar position of competing with everybody and nobody at the same time.
Last week Oracle closed the book on a deal to acquire Corente, in a play which is claimed to further integrate the company into the software defined networking (SDN) space, while last month Oracle announced sponsorship of the OpenStack Foundation.
According to Verizon, customers will have access to per-hour billing in a cloud solution which has the slogan ‘performance without compromise’.
“Few companies begin with a complete cloud environment, and the benefits of migrating to the cloud have at times been outweighed by the challenges and costs associated with making a change,” noted John Stratton, Verizon Enterprise Solutions president.
“Oracle and Verizon have now removed those obstacles,” he added.
Companies can sign up to be a beta customer here. What do you make of this enterprise play?
