Arik Hesseldahl

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Oracle and Microsoft Team Up on Cloud Computing

oracle_microsoftLongtime competitors Microsoft and Oracle said today they will work together to make their products more compatible for customers wanting to move their computing environments to the cloud.

In a pair of corporate blog posts, (Oracle’s here; Microsoft’s here) the companies said that Oracle will support customers who want to run its software on virtual machines running Windows and also on its Windows Azure cloud computing service.

The move essentially allows customers running cloud-friendly variants of Microsoft’s Windows server operating system to run Oracle software, including its primary database software, Java, and other software, on Hyper-V and Azure. Oracle will also make its flavor of Linux, known as Oracle Linux, available to customers using Windows Azure.

“Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

The same statement quotes Oracle president Mark Hurd as saying that the company is “committed to providing greater choice and flexibility to customers by providing multiple deployment options for our software, including on-premises, as well as public, private, and hybrid clouds.”

The deal is the first of a series of announcements that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison previewed last week during a conference call with analysts to discuss earnings.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald