Red Hat Inc. today announced a nonexclusive alliance with Oracle Corp. under which Red Hat Enterprise Linux will become a supported operating system on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

IBM-owned Red Hat said the deal is significant in that 90% of Fortune 500 companies currently use products from at least one of the two companies. Standardizing on RHEL will “enable customers to gain a common platform that stretches from their data center to the OCI distributed cloud,” the company said.

Under the agreement, certified configurations of OCI virtual machines can now run RHEL, making it simpler for customers to migrate existing workloads to the Oracle Cloud. Customers can also contact either vendor for technical support through an expanded joint agreement.

Oracle will continue to offer Oracle Enterprise Linux as its default cloud platform. “Should a customer want to move their workloads on OCI from OEL to RHEL, they can use Red Hat’s convert2rhel tool or, optionally, work with Red Hat Consulting to do so,” Mike Evans, vice president of technical business development at Red Hat said in emailed comments.

RHEL has been certified on OCI virtual machines of up to 80 CPU cores in single-CPU increments, and with between 1 gigabyte and 1,024 gigabytes of memory, depending on the processor. Red Hat plans to add a broader range of configurations throughout this year, Evans said.

“Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility,” Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a statement.

Red Hat wouldn’t commit to offering more of its products on the Oracle Cloud, but Evans said, “We are exploring many options, including multiple ways to consume RHEL within OCI (as we have done with other hyperscalers), broader instance types as well adding additional Red Hat products. All of this will be decided based on customer demand.”

The company has an ecosystem of its own and the company can play a role in connecting its partners with Oracle’s, said Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of Red Hat Partner Ecosystem Success. “Our goal is to be a catalyst to join the partners together to create an ecosystem,” she said. “It’s not about one company or another’s ecosystem; it’s how they come together.”

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