Verizon calls 1-800-Oracle, orders a database, Fusion cloud meal deal

As far as some developers are concerned, a marriage between massive telco Verizon and proprietary software king Oracle measures somewhere between mandated use of Windows ME and a ban on home working.

But, undeterred by such naysayers, the two giants have teamed up to load Oracle's Database and Fusion Middleware onto the recently unveiled Verizon public cloud.

This marks a further turn by Oracle towards cooperation, as the giant shifts from being a cloud-hating, on-premises-loving firm to one that's licking its lips at the sight of a changing IT market. Oracle even operates its own FrankenCloud, and has also partnered with Microsoft to get the Oracle database running on Windows Azure.

"The reality is the genesis of this agreement is probably a year and a half old," admitted Verizon Terremark's chief technology officer John Considine.

"It really came from us initially looking to license Oracle software into our cloud and be free of the physical CPU binding as it relates to those environments.

"As we developed the enterprise cloud and grew our customer base, there was demand."

Eventually, there was a partnership meeting between the president of Verizon's Enterprise Solutions division John Stratton and Oracle's President Mark Hurd.

Verizon did the deal because, as an upstart cloud provider, it needs two things to take business away from market leader Amazon Web Services: software support, and good infrastructure.

The Oracle database and middleware deal adds to the existing partnerships Verizon has in place with Red Hat, Microsoft, Cloudera, and others, to give its cloud a broad ecosystem of software.

Verizon's infrastructure is already taken care of by some lightly customized SeaMicro appliances. Though Considine conceded there have been some growing pains – "we've been helping debug them" – the integrated kit is working well.

The main bug to emerge was a resolution problem between Verizon's flat software-defined network and each SeaMicro network card, but this problem has been resolved, he said.

At the time of writing pricing of the service was undisclosed, though we're told it should be live by the end of the week. ®