Microsoft and Oracle team up tot take on the Amazon cloud

The rise of Amazon Web Services’s hulking infrastructure cloud has turned former rivals Microsoft and Oracle into chums. Redmond announced on Thursday that Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Java were all now available on the Windows Azure cloud, served up in license-included virtual machine images, just as El Reg told you it would last month. “These images are conveniently located in the Windows Azure Image Gallery,” Microsoft wrote in the blog post announcing the move.

Anyone who ever followed the relational database wars probably noted this tidbit last week:  Oracle’s flagship database. WebLogic Server middleware and Java are all  now generally available on Microsoft Windows Azure as “license-included virtual machine images” in the Windows Azure Image Gallery. The timing was not really a surprise; Last month, Microsoft had signaled that it would post the images on March 12. But some background is in order:  It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft armed with SQL Server went to war against the Oracle database juggernaut. And it made headway at least in Windows shops, in small and mid-sized companies and in departments of enterprises. But Oracle retained its market share lead by holding onto large accounts in financial and other compliance-preoccupied industries.