Comments and categories
"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based," said Robert Shimp, group VP of Oracle Global Technology business unit.
"Intel and Oracle are taking a leadership role to expand the reach of enterprise-ready cloud computing," said Doug Fisher, VP of the Software and Solutions Group (SSG), and GM of SSG's Systems Software Division at Intel. "By collaborating to improve efficiency, extend standards and enhance security, we're making cloud computing more of an option for enterprise deployments."
That's nice of them. This is the second collaboration in cloud computing Intel has got involved with recently, having announced a research joint effort with HP and Yahoo! a couple of months ago. It seems that cloud computing is going to be the Next Big Thing in the industry and the largest technology companies are all jostling to make sure they're well positioned to capitalise on it.
Oracle and Intel have subdivided their collaboration into three categories: efficiency, security and standards. The efficiency seems to revolve around better use of virtualisation technologies on Xeon processors.
The security of virtual machines in a shared cloud environment is vital and is an obvious area of collaboration for the two of them, while the portability of virtual machine images, such as the Open Virtual Format (OVF), will be instrumental in ensuring broadly compatible standards for cloud computing.
