Right before Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL)‘s strategic alliance with NetSuite Inc (NYSE:N) to deliver integrated HCM and ERP cloud services for mid-size customers, Oracle has made two significant partnership movements. Oracle unveiled a “strategic partnership” with salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) right after its deal with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced a day earlier on June 24. As promised by management, Oracle is making a series of partnership movements to enhance its cloud capabilities.
Microsoft deal
An analyst from Forrester Research indicated that the alliance should help Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Azure compete better with other web-accessed cloud services while make Oracle’s offerings more competitive to other “open-source” alternatives.
Salesforce.com partnership
The deal with salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) includes a comprehensive nine-year partnership encompassing all three tiers of cloud computing: Applications, Platform, and Infrastructure. To put it in a simple way, it is “the simplicity of Salesforce.com combined with the power of Oracle,” as quoted from Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) will integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud while providing the core technology to power Salesforce.com’s applications and platform. On the other hand, Salesforce.com will standardize Oracle’s major systems and database, as well as Java Middleware platform while implementing Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company.
What’s there for Oracle’s new partners
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) is making a series of partnership movements to step up against its competition in the cloud market, and so are Microsoft, Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc (NYSE:N). With the new partnership, Microsoft can now better compete with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, where Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Oracle have worked together to provide businesses with a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective business application platform. With added flexibility and choice offered via its new hybrid cloud solutions, Microsoft can now boost up its competitiveness in the fast expanding cloud market.
As for Salesforce.com, the new partnership allows it to compete better against companies like International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) as data is increasingly going mobile and moving from customer-owned computers to the cloud. With the new partnership, Salesforce.com will gain three major advantages: cutting database server costs “in half,” penetrating into Oracle customers, and obtaining Oracle as a customer.
Lastly, the deal between Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) and NetSuite will help minimize the conflicts between two companies as both will now focus on mid-sized customers instead of Oracle’s huge ones. Oracle can also step up its competition against younger rival Workday Inc (NYSE:WDAY) in the market of human capital management.
Oracle is fighting back
As Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) transitions some of its business to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, it has a tough time combating a sluggish macro economy and declining hardware business. While Oracle failed to deliver revenue growth for hardware in the last quarter, the management is nowpredicting a turnaround next quarter.
