Oracle latest to thaw relations with Microsoft
Oracle latest to thaw relations with Microsoft
Last month, it was Sun's CEO Scott McNealy who surprised industry observers by ending years of bitter acrimony with Microsoft by signing a ten-year collaboration agreement with the software giant. Now fellow long-term Microsoft adversary Oracle has decided that co-operation is better than conflict by agreeing to a developmental partnership, the first such agreement between the two rival software makers.
Oracle has joined Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program as a premier level partner, a move which Oracle says will increase developer productivity and ease deployment of Oracle-based applications on the Microsoft Windows platform.
The announcement represents something of a turnaround for the famously outspoken Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who has been one of Microsoft's harshest critics down the years. Ellison recently trumpeted the Linux operating system as a more secure alternative to Windows, predicting that the open source system would lord it over Microsoft in the data centre environment.
"Oracle is committed to delivering a great database for Windows and making Windows developers more productive when using Oracle Database," said Andrew J. Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, at Oracle, in a statement. "By integrating more closely with Visual Studio, we will make it easier for Windows developers to harness the power of Oracle Database. We are excited to join the VSIP program and expect that Oracle and Visual Studio developers will benefit from this collaboration."
"Microsoft is pleased to announce our partnership with Oracle," said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of Servers and Tools at Microsoft. "The integration of Oracle's products with Visual Studio .NET 2003 will provide our mutual customers with a more productive developer environment for building Oracle applications on the Microsoft Windows platform."
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