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 saabira.chaudhuri@dowjones.com
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