If you were expecting some dramatic, cloudy news from Oracle and Microsoft, as the companies hintedlast week they would reveal, you were likely disappointed by the nuts and bolts nature of what the two companies announced on Monday as part of an extended strategic partnership.
No, Oracle is not shutting down its public cloud and moving customers to Windows Azure – or Amazon Web Services, for that matter. But now customers using Oracle’s 11g and 12c databases and WebLogic middleware will be able to deploy those database and middleware programs on top of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, which now has a 30 per cent market share among x86 server virtualization hypervisors compared to about 52 per cent for VMware’s ESXi.