Oracle OpenWorld 2019: Oracle and VMware announce hybrid cloud partnership, new free Oracle cloud tier for devs

Oracle joins Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in VMware’s list of partner cloud providers

Oracle and VMware have announced a new partnership that will see Oracle’s public cloud integrate with VMware’s data centre infrastructure.

The announcement, made at the company’s annual OpenWorld user conference in San Fransisco, is the latest in a raft of deals VMware has struck with public cloud providers as it seeks to solidify its infrastructure, which is ubiquitous in data centres, as a lynchpin for hybrid cloud environments.

According to IDC, 83 percent of workloads are virtualised today, and 60 percent of large enterprises run VMs in the public cloud. Accordingly, fiercely competitive public cloud providers are racing to make their clouds with VMware infrastructure.

As part of today’s deal, Oracle will enable customers to run VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, allowing them to run Oracle’s core services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud on VMware’s infrastructure, the companies said.

The announcement will also help Oracle’s cloud application suite strategy. Oracle, which according to IDC is North America’s largest enterprise application vendor, wants to ensure its traditional customer base can easily embed Oracle applications into a smooth-functioning hybrid cloud.

“As more of our customers make the move to cloud, they’re looking for a superior VMware experience. We are excited that Oracle Cloud customers will be able to run VMware workloads in Oracle Cloud and retain VMware administrative access,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“This is made possible by Layer 2 networking in the cloud and our bare metal service. Customers will be able to extend existing VMware investments, processes, and tools while benefitting from the security and performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

The partnership is expected to go live in the first half of 2020.

In addition to the VMware partnership, Oracle also announced a massive expansion of its public cloud infrastructure. Oracle will launch 20 new Oracle Cloud regions by 2020, taking its total number to 36. New data centres will be opened in North America, Europe and Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Oracle also announced that developers would be able to access a limited version of its cloud service for free, including a restricted version of Autonomous Database. The company also took the wraps off a free self-fixing Linux distribution and new cloud security services.