Oracle Corp. and VMware Inc. established a new partnership that will enable customers to leverage the companies' enterprise software and cloud services to move to the cloud infrastructure. The latest partnership is allowing customers to set up hybrid cloud environments that combine VMware infrastructure in their own data centers with public clouds. Also, the collaboration offers customers the ability to support their hybrid cloud strategies by running VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The companies' partnership was announced at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco earlier this week. At the conference, both companies also announced an expanded mutual technical support agreement for Oracle products running on VMware environments.

Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Don Johnson says, "As more of our customers make the move to cloud, they're looking for us to offer superior support for VMware. We are excited that Oracle Cloud customers will be able to run VMware workloads on Oracle Cloud and retain full VMware administrative access."

The partnership between Oracle and VMware can be a significant combination, as the Oracle database technology is very pervasive in the enterprise. As a cloud provider, Oracle is vying against Amazon and Microsoft to offer cloud services, where businesses utilize Oracle's data centers to handle their computing needs. But partnering with VMware, Oracle becomes a partner in the VMware Cloud Provider Program and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution that will be sold by Oracle and its partners. The company will also offer technical support to customers who run its applications on VMware.

According to VMware spokesperson, once the service is live customers it will have the ability to run VMware Cloud Foundation – an integrated software stack that uses SDDC Manager – on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including the hypervisor vSphere, virtual network software NSX, and virtual storage software vSAN. Furthermore, VMware Cloud Foundation will run on bare-metal servers in Oracle's cloud data centers, whose number is projected to grow quickly over the next 15 months.

Besides the partnership with VMware, Oracle also plans to expedite the expansion rate of its global cloud platform. The company would add 20 cloud availability regions to the existing 16 cloud platforms before the end of 2020.

Today, several cloud holdouts or vendors use VMware to power their own data centers. The company's product, VMware Workstation, enables users to set up virtual machines on a single physical machine, and leverage them at the same time along with the actual machine.