Oracle Corp. has become the latest public cloud platform provider to team up with VMware Inc. to advance the idea of running computing workloads in a similar way both in corporate data centers and in the cloud.

The companies announced today a new partnership that will enable their joint customers to setup hybrid cloud environments that can run VMware services in Oracle’s cloud.

The announcement came at the database and business application giant’s annual OpenWorld user conference taking place in San Francisco, where Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (pictured) unveiled a raft of other products and services as well.

Oracle said it has built a new system that enables joint customers to move VMware-based computing workloads to its cloud without rewriting any code.

The partnership comes at a time of increased collaboration between public cloud platform providers and enterprise software firms. Enterprises in recent years have shown a growing appetite for computing platforms that interoperate with one another, including public cloud platforms and on-premises systems. Benefits for enterprises include more choice, being able to run various workloads on the most suitable kind of infrastructure, and a reduced likelihood of being locked into a single platform.

This trend has ensured VMware has become a key partner for public cloud computing providers such as Oracle and its rivals, which include Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. That’s because VMware’s software is used to power the vast majority of on-premises enterprise data centers. The company’s virtualization software helps to make systems more efficient by splitting physical computer servers into multiple smaller “virtual” machines, to ensure that all of a company’s computers are put to full use.

As a result, it’s vital for cloud providers such as Oracle to ensure full technical compatibility with VMware’s software. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all struck similar partnerships with VMware in recent years.

VMware’s partnership with AWS is notably different because VMware manages and provides services on the AWS cloud itself. In Oracle’s case, as with Google and Microsoft, the cloud company is the provider.

Oracle said that as part of this partnership it will also provide technical support for its software running in VMware. This will cover both Oracle-certified cloud environments and customers’ on-premises data centers, it said.

Once the service is up and running, customers will be able to run the VMware Cloud Foundation, an infrastructure software stack which includes the vSphere hypervisor, NSX virtual network software and vSAN virtual storage software, on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure. This will enable customers to run Oracle’s core services, including the Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud on VMware’s infrastructure, the companies said.

The companies said the service is expected to go live in the first half of 2020.

Given its almost ubiquitous presence in corporate data centers, VMware should prove to be a key partner for Oracle as it battles its cloud rivals for more enterprise workloads, said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc.

“The big benefit for enterprises is that they do not have to retest workloads, as the on-premises best practice is that starting a VM will ‘just work,’” Mueller said. “The result is an easy way for them to move workloads to one of the most prominent public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.”

News of the partnership came as Oracle announced a big expansion of its public cloud infrastructure, saying it will add 20 new cloud regions to its existing 16 regions by the end of next year. This expansion will see new Oracle cloud data centers come online in countries across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

Oracle also announced the availability of its Generation 2 Exadata database computer on its Cloud at Customer service. Exadata is Oracle’s hardware system for delivering maximum Oracle database performance, while Oracle Cloud at Customer is a portfolio of cloud services which can be accessed via customer’s own data centers.

In other news at OpenWorld, the company said it was expanding its recent partnership with Microsoft Azure. It also announced new cloud security services, the introduction of a new free tier for its cloud that gives developers limited access to Oracle Cloud resources, and the launch of a management services for Autonomous Linux, nonautonomous Linux, and Windows on Oracle Cloud.

Photo: Will Childs