Tech giant Oracle has announced corporate sponsorship of the OpenStack Foundation, clearing the path for integration between the open source software and its various clouds.

The Redwood firm plans to integrate a huge amount of its products into the OpenStack technology, including Oracle’s virtual machine, its infrastructure as a service, as well as its Exalogic elastic cloud, its storage and its compute cloud.

Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, said in a statement: “Oracle is pleased to join the OpenStack Foundation and plans to integrate OpenStack capabilities into a broad set of Oracle products and cloud services.

“Our goal is to give customers greater choice and flexibility in how they use Oracle products and services in public and private clouds,” he added.

Mark Collier, OpenStack Foundation chief operating officer, said: “We welcome Oracle to the OpenStack community, and look forward to innovative contributions from their many domain experts as we continue to pursue the vision of a common cloud management platform.”

Oracle’s involvement in OpenStack is an intriguing one. As reported by The Register, a search for OpenStack in Stackalytics saw 13341 commits attributed to Rackspace, 8800 to Red Hat, 6536 to HP – and a big fat zero for Oracle.

Given OpenStack’s big USP is an “open alternative to cloud lock-in”, this news comes at an opportune time following IBM – another OpenStack user – announcing patent pending technology earlier this week which aims to avoid vendor lock-in.

Another Oracle product to be phased in with OpenStack is enterprise Unix OS Oracle Solaris, with senior principal product director Larry Wake writing in a blog post: “The Oracle Solaris team is looking forward to contributing back to the OpenStack project, and we expect the work we do and the integration we can provide will be of significant benefit to our customers going forward.”

Going into 2014, this move will certainly be of interest, with Oracle joining the over 190 businesses in the OpenStack project, including a host of big players. HP is the most interesting name in that list, especially given Salesforce’s recent partnership announcement with them appears to have put the kybosh on the SaaS leader’s alliance with Oracle launched back in July.

What do you make of this news?