Oracle Strikes Deal With Salesforce.com to Integrate Clouds

   By Saabira Chaudhuri 
 

Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) on Tuesday unveiled a nine-year technology alliance under which the two companies will integrate their clouds.

Salesforce.com, a sales and marketing software developer, is the second traditional rival that Oracle has partnered with this week. On Monday it unveiled a pact with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to allow pieces of Oracle's business software to more closely mesh with Microsoft's software and online services.

After disappointing shareholders with sales that fell short of expectations last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison hinted he would unveil partnerships this week involving the cloud with some important partners.

Oracle, Microsoft and SAP AG (SAP) have dominated the market for customer-relationship-management software installed on company servers and operated behind corporate firewalls. Salesforce.com offers competing software it streams online to computers, tablets and smartphones, relieving customers of the cost of maintaining computer servers for the task.

As for the latest deal, Salesforce.com will use the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and Java Middleware Platform.

Meanwhile, Oracle plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud applications throughout the company.

"When customers choose cloud applications, they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box--even when the applications are from different vendors," Mr. Ellison said.

Oracle is best known for software, including databases and business applications, which corporate customers have historically installed and run on their own server systems. But the Redwood Shores, Calif., company has been developing cloud-based versions of many of those products, particularly for handling specific functions such as human resources.

Shares of Salesforce.com were up 2.2% to $37.78 in recent trading, while those of Oracle were down 16 cents to $30.01.

Write to Saabira Chaudhuri at [e-mail]

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