Ellison fluffs Amazon with Oracle cloud love

OpenWorld No wonder Larry Ellison was waxing lyrical on Sunday about how Amazon's model of elastic computing jived with Oracle's view of the cloud.

On Monday, Oracle followed up by announcing its middleware, applications, virtual machine, database, and new Linux kernel have been certified to run on the toaster seller's EC2 infrastructure. Oracle will also support the software: E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware, Database, and Oracle Linux on Amazon's cloud.

So seriously is Ellison taking the Amazon cloud that the CEO who's happy for you to rip out one of your server's CPUs rather than cut a discount on an Oracle software license, he's letting you use your existing Oracle licenses to run his company's software on Amazon EC2.

Or you "may acquire new licenses from Oracle," the company said breezily while announcing the Amazon alliance. Oracle didn't explain what the rules are for re-using your existing license or under what circumstances you might need a new license.

Such is the knotted ball of string Oracle's pushing up into the cloud there are, of course, pre-configurations. Amazon and Oracle will publish a set of pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) of Oracle's software based on the database giant's VM templates that the giant claimed would speed deployment from weeks to days or minutes. AMIs mean the software can take advantage of Amazon's load balancing, security, and scaling.

The first AMIs will cover Oracle's Linux, Database 11gR2, E-Business Suite, and Fusion Middleware - including WebLogic Server and Business Process Management. Future AMIs are planned for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, and Oracle's JD Edwards applications.

Speaking the evening before the Amazon news, Ellison said there are two opposing views of the cloud: building a platform that's virtualized and elastic to build and deliver applications, or simply running "one or two applications on the internet".

The former is Amazon, the latter Salesforce. The latter competes head to head with Oracle in business applications and recently announced a deal to put Java applications in the cloud using VMware. The former does not compete with Oracle.

But Salesforce is also an Oracle customer, and Ellison is a Salesforce investor. Such is the rough and tumble of Silicon Valley and its CEOs.

"We believe it [cloud] is a platform. We believe on that platform you run standards-based software - databases, application development tools, guest operating systems. It must be a comprehensive application development environment to run all your applications. It must be virtualized, it must be elastic, it must include hardware and software," Ellison said. ®