Microsoft is making a push to sell developers on the benefits of its Windows Azure platform for cloud and mobile applications.

Speaking at the company’s Build conference, Microsoft server and tools president Satya Nadella said that the company’s cloud platform provided a simple solution for developers looking to offer their applications on public or private cloud services as well as a back end for mobile and web-based application developers.

Microsoft is reporting strong interest in its Azure brand. Nadella said that the service has some 65 million users and is adding some 1,000 customers daily. Additionally, he said that the company’s private cloud offering is striking a chord with businesses as well.

“Given that we are seeing tremendous growth for the high-end server software, people are buying to support their own infrastructure for the apps you are building,” he told developers.

The push for Microsoft comes just days after the company announced a high-profile deal with Oracle which will bring the Database and Java platforms to Azure, a move which could further extend the Microsoft cloud brand.

Additionally, the company sees the Azure Mobile Services platform as an ideal solution for mobile device developers looking to offer cloud services and support for their mobile apps. The company said that the service will provide developers with support for mulitple platforms, including Windows Phone, Android, iOS and HTML5 applications.

To help boost developer interest in the cloud platform, the company is offering a number of developer-only perks such as a free 20MB SQL database for testing mobile applications on Azure and a free subscription to Office 365.

Nadella said that the productivity suite can also function as a useful tool for developers, allowing them to access vital components in the suite to use with their own applications.

“Everything from social graph to identity, document libraries, all of that is available for you to use in modern APIs,” he said.

“The idea is to be able to do all of that with first class tool support.”

Hell has frozen over. Oracle founder Larry Ellison has made peace with Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, as well as NetSuite, in an apparent end to the war of words that has taken place between the firms over the year.

For those that have followed the evolution of these firms’ rivalry as the cloud market has grown, this is one of the most surprising announcements in recent years.

Indeed, only as recently as late 2011, Ellison was kicking Benioff from his Oracle OpenWorld speaking slot, forcing the Salesforce chief to rock up at another hotel and give his keynote. However, it was smiles and handshakes – tightly gripped, one imagines – on Tuesday as the two firms announced their cloud partnership.

In a joint statement they explained that Salesforce would be migrating the core of its cloud computing platform to Oracle products including Database and Java Middleware. Additionally, the on-demand software pioneer will adopt Oracle Exadata systems and integrate Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud into its services.

Ellison gushed about the deal: “When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box – even when the applications are from different vendors.

“That’s why Marc and I believe it’s important that our two companies work together to make it happen, and integrate the Salesforce.com and Oracle Clouds.”

Not to be outdone in the love-in, Benioff rolled out the superlatives too: “Larry and I both agree that Salesforce.com and Oracle need to integrate our clouds. Salesforce.com’s CRM integrated with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud is the best of both worlds: the simplicity of Salesforce.com combined with the power of Oracle.”

Ah, perhaps it was that classic of hate equals love all along. Of course, no one would be as naïve as to think the two IT heavyweights are doing this for each others’ health, and analysts were quick to point out there was plenty of mutual back-scratching taking place.

Bo Lykkegaard, research director for European Enterprise Applications at IDC, told V3 that the deal was very much a ‘marriage of convenience’ for the two firms.

“For Oracle, it’s a big sale, because now any Salesforce customer will be using Oracle data centres and transaction tools. It’s a great reference customer too, so they can look to sell their applications to those companies using Salesforce,” he said.

“By the same token, for Salesforce, Oracle has committed to better integration between their back office and financial applications and human capital management applications, so this will open up the installed based for Salesforce.”

Meanwhile, in what must have been a busy few weeks for the Oracle exec team, the firm also signed a notable partnership with Microsoft. The deal will see Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Azure support Oracle’s Database, Java and WebLogic Server platforms, as well as its Linux build.

Forrester analyst John Rymer said that the deal was a smart move for Microsoft as it would remove business headaches over support for Java within Microsoft products.

“With this licence, Microsoft can finally offer Java as a preinstalled, first-class environment on Windows Azure as well as its Hyper-V virtualisation software,” Rymer said in a blog post on the Microsoft/Oracle deal.
 
“Developers can and do run Java applications on Azure, but strictly as a ‘bring your own’ exercise; they were not able to get usage rights to and support for the technology from Microsoft. Without a licence, Java would always be a second-class denizen of Windows Azure.

“Now enterprise customers can get the legal air cover they require for crucial technologies. As a result, we expect to see much wider usage of Windows Azure for a wider range of Java applications.”

For Oracle, the deal means it has more chances to sell its applications by having support for Microsoft’s platform, as Lykkegaard from IDC explained.

“Oracle has so far worked with Rackspace and Amazon, so this tie-up with Azure is good for Oracle because it gives them a new deployment option, especially when they sell to customers that are strongly invested in Microsoft,” he told V3.

As if that wasn’t enough for Oracle and its extending of olive branches, the firm then announced a partnership with NetSuite to to deliver integrated human capital management (HCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud computing services for mid-size enterprises.

So, for now it is smiles all round, and later on Thursday Ellison and Benioff will be holding a ceremony to celebrate their union – an event Benioff is looking forward to:

V3 will be covering the event live to hear the speeches, and provide more information on the deals as the two star-crossed chief executives chat about the deal they have signed.

Oracle is continuing its string of strategic alliances with the announcement that it is partnering with NetSuite to deliver integrated human capital management (HCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud computing services for mid-size enterprises.

The move continues the string of strategic alliances from the database and enterprise software giant, which earlier this week disclosed a cloud partnership with Salesforce.com and an agreement with Microsoft that will see Oracle products made available on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

Under today’s announcement with Netsuite, Oracle said the pair are developing a strategy to integrate Oracle HCM Cloud and NetSuite Cloud ERP to deliver a single, integrated solution that seamlessly connects HR and finance systems for mid-size customers.

In addition, professional services giant Deloitte has given an undertaking to work with Oracle and NetSuite in order to develop a practice aimed at helping customers implement the integrated end product from the two firms.

Oracle President Mark Hurd said the aim was to give mid-size enterprise customers a competitive advantage by allowing them to quickly implement business solutions at a lower cost.

“NetSuite and Oracle are now working together to provide access to Oracle’s leading enterprise-level cloud-based HR and Talent Management solutions that are integrated with NetSuite’s Cloud ERP suite applications. With Deloitte implementing these integrated solutions, mid-size companies can quickly gain access to an incredible new level of HR management that can help impact their bottom line,” he explained.

For large organisations where Oracle HCM is already deployed, two-tier deployments of NetSuite into smaller subsidiaries will enable these to easily connect with the main corporate HR system, the firm said.

The chief technology officer of retail giant Marks & Spencer, Alan French, has lamented the pricing structures used for cloud computing services, claiming it is stopping the company from moving its order processing platforms to the cloud.

French said that Marks & Spencer now processes almost five billion transactions per year but, while many other parts of the retailer’s IT infrastructure has moved to the cloud, this area has proven impossible to shift due to prohibitive pricing curves.

“As we buy new software, we are pushing hard for it to be available as a service,” he said at the Cloud World Forum event in London, attended by V3.

“Almost all of our suppliers assume that there is a simple, linear link between the scale [and] cost. We’re running through close to five billion transactions per year; we’re not going to pay for it on a transaction basis and we’ll have difficulty paying for it on a per gigabyte basis.”

French urged IT suppliers to find a way to meet the needs of the firm: “The big challenge is this: Give us a deal we can buy. Our volume currently prohibits us from moving into software as a service.”

M&S has already moved all of its email into the cloud as well as many of its other operations, but as yet, French does not see the cloud as a one-size-fits-all solution.

“There isn’t a silver bullet. There’s clearly a lot of value in it but it requires work. Our sotware suppliers need to invest in software as a service. What they need to do is find a commercial model that works,” he added.

French’s comments are interesting as they appear to represent a change in the problems seen by CTOs with large-scale cloud deployments; rather than security or viability, cost is now a barrier standing in the way of migrating to the cloud.

No doubt firms such as Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Oracle, which recently signed some notable cloud-related agreements, will be keen to try and meet the IT chief’s needs with their cloud product portfolios.

Petroleum giant BP has revealed it has 20,000 devices being used by staff as part of a bring your own device (BYOD) programme, from a workforce of 87,000 employees, according to its chief information officer, Dana Deasy.

Deasy said the firm moved to embrace the BYOD culture once it saw the shift and recognised it had to react quickly: “It was a snowball coming at us. You can either embrace it or fight it to the bitter end. We decided to embrace it two years ago,” he said, speaking at the Cloud World Forum event attended by V3.

“Once we got to the point of embracing, we got fully engaged around the idea of how the company can allow its employees to manage their own personal devices.”

However, Deasy said that staff have to agree to certain provisions being put in place on their device before they can have access to the BP network.

“To put their devices on our network, they have to obey certain rules and have an agent on them to manage it,” he explained. “It creates two separate worlds, one for their corporate world and one for their personal world.”

Deasy also gave some more insight into the scale of IT use at the firm, explaining it has 17,000 internal servers in use, storing a whopping 57 petabytes of data. As well as this, there is an estate of 90,000 PCs in use at the firm.

The move to embrace BYOD echoes a similar policy being rolled out by rival petroleum company Shell, which revealed earlier this year that it planned to allow its entire 135,000-strong workforce to take advantage of a BYOD programme.

Hell has frozen over. Oracle founder Larry Ellison has made peace with Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. For those that have followed the evolution of the two firms’ rivalry as the cloud market has grown, this is one of the most surprising announcements in recent years.

Indeed, only as recently as late 2011, Ellison was kicking Benioff from his Oracle OpenWorld speaking slot, forcing the Salesforce chief to rock up at another hotel and give his keynote. However, it was smiles and handshakes – tightly gripped, one imagines – on Tuesday as the two firms announced their cloud partnership.

In a joint statement they explained that Salesforce would be migrating the core of its cloud computing platform to Oracle products including Database and Java Middleware. Additionally, the on-demand software pioneer will adopt Oracle Exadata systems and integrate Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud into its services.

Ellison gushed about the deal: “When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box – even when the applications are from different vendors.

“That’s why Marc and I believe it’s important that our two companies work together to make it happen, and integrate the Salesforce.com and Oracle Clouds.”

Not to be outdone in the love-in, Benioff rolled out the superlatives too: “Larry and I both agree that Salesforce.com and Oracle need to integrate our clouds. Salesforce.com’s CRM integrated with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud is the best of both worlds: the simplicity of Salesforce.com combined with the power of Oracle.”

Ah, perhaps it was that classic of hate equals love all along. Of course, no one would be as naïve as to think the two IT heavyweights are doing this for each others’ health, and analysts were quick to point out there was plenty of mutual back-scratching taking place.

Bo Lykkegaard, research director for European Enterprise Applications at IDC, told V3 that the deal was very much a ‘marriage of convenience’ for the two firms.

“For Oracle, it’s a big sale, because now any Salesforce customer will be using Oracle data centres and transaction tools. It’s a great reference customer too, so they can look to sell their applications to those companies using Salesforce,” he said.

“By the same token, for Salesforce, Oracle has committed to better integration between their back office and financial applications and human capital management applications, so this will open up the installed based for Salesforce.”

Meanwhile, in what must have been a busy few weeks for the Oracle exec team, the firm also signed a notable partnership with Microsoft. The deal will see Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Azure support Oracle’s Database, Java and WebLogic Server platforms, as well as its Linux build.

Forrester analyst John Rymer said that the deal was a smart move for Microsoft as it would remove business headaches over support for Java within Microsoft products.

“With this licence, Microsoft can finally offer Java as a preinstalled, first-class environment on Windows Azure as well as its Hyper-V virtualisation software,” Rymer said in a blog post on the Microsoft/Oracle deal.
 
“Developers can and do run Java applications on Azure, but strictly as a ‘bring your own’ exercise; they were not able to get usage rights to and support for the technology from Microsoft. Without a licence, Java would always be a second-class denizen of Windows Azure.

“Now enterprise customers can get the legal air cover they require for crucial technologies. As a result, we expect to see much wider usage of Windows Azure for a wider range of Java applications.”

For Oracle, the deal means it has more chances to sell its applications by having support for Microsoft’s platform, as Lykkegaard from IDC explained.

“Oracle has so far worked with Rackspace and Amazon, so this tie-up with Azure is good for Oracle because it gives them a new deployment option, especially when they sell to customers that are strongly invested in Microsoft,” he told V3.

For now it is smiles all round, and later on Thursday Ellison and Benioff will be holding a ceremony to celebrate their union – an event Benioff is looking forward to:

V3 will be covering the event live to hear the speeches, and provide more information on the deals as the two star-crossed chief executives chat about the deal they have signed.

Oracle has once again agreed to a cloud computing project with a former rival by signing a collaboration deal with Salesforce.com.

The companies said in a joint statement that that Salesforce would be migrating the core technology of its cloud computing platforms to Oracle products including Database and Java Middleware. Additionally, the company will adopt Oracle Exadata systems and integrate Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud into its services.

The deal could end what has become a frigid relationships between Oracle and Salesforce.com. Driven by growing competition in the cloud and CRM markets, the two firms have engaged in a very public war of words lead by chief executives Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison.

Most recently, the two companies squared off at the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld conference when Benioff was unceremoniously removed from his scheduled keynote address shortly before the conference kicked off.

“When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box – even when the applications are from different vendors,” Ellison said.

“That’s why Marc and I believe it’s important that our two companies work together to make it happen, and integrate the salesforce.com and Oracle Clouds.”

The announcement comes the day after Oracle announced a deal with longtime rival Microsoft to extend support on its products to the Windows Azure and Hyper-V cloud platforms. Analysts have said that such deals will be necessary should Oracle be able to maintain its stature in the cloud computing age.

Data visualisation firm Roambi has announced Roambi Business, a cloud-based version of its platform that takes complex data and presents it in an interactive graphic format to business users on their iPhone or iPad device.

Officially available from today, Roambi Business offers similar capabilities to the firm’s existing Roambi Analytics product, but handles the back-end processing via a cloud-based service instead of requiring customers to deploy an on-premise middleware server.

This opens up Roambi to a broader audience, including smaller businesses that may lack the IT skills or infrastructure to deploy the existing platform, according to the firm.

Roambi vice president for Northern Europe Steve Neat told V3 that in both products, the aim is to redesign the way that people interact with data, share that data and present it, all from a mobile perspective in line with the modern workplace.

“This is about delivering content in a usable format on a mobile device that people love. People want tablets and want to interact and engage with these devices. Analytics is traditionally available on the desktop, but increasingly people are more mobile, so this is about helping people to be more productive by delivering insights onto those devices,” he said.

Roambi Business can take data from a number of sources, including CRM systems, databases or traditional business intelligence systems, but most commonly this will be an Excel spreadsheet exported as comma separated values (CSV), according to Neat.

Once the data is uploaded, Roambi analyses the data and intelligently looks for key metrics such as times or dates that it can use for comparison. Users can tweak the output and then select from a number of views that the platform generates to visualise the data.

The entire process can take mere minutes, Neat said, and provides interactive visual views of the data that lets users drill down and focus on key data points where necessary.

“We’re aiming to deliver insight, helping people understand the numbers rather than overwhelming them with large spreadsheets or big BI tools. We’re distilling it down to simple key performance indicators,” he said.

Roambi also provides basic mobile device management (MDM) tools that enable an administrator to lock a mobile device temporarily, or else wipe the Roambi application from the device to protect company data if it has been stolen.

The new Roambi Business service is hosted and delivered from Amazon’s cloud platform, the firm disclosed. On the client side, it supports the iPhone, iPad and iPad Mini. Licensing is $39 (£25) per user per month, but with a minimum purchase of 10 licences for one year specified.

Sales on the government’s IT procurement service G-Cloud topped £25m in May, with £3.5m of purchases made by government departments and institutions since April.

This is slightly down on April’s spend of £4m, but that was significantly boosted by a £1.2m deal with IBM from the Home Office. This time round, many smaller but significant deals were brokered by a number of departments, including the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the NHS.

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust shelled out £129,000 to InTechnology for a hosted eHealth service, in the largest single software and hardware transaction on the list. The service allows health professionals to update health records remotely, directly from a medical instrument.

Other notable deals included an spend of over £500,000 by the Home Office, with various vendors supplying hosting and server management solutions. Elsewhere, i2N secured a £110,000 deal with the Ministry of Justice, while Microsoft secured deals for a number of Office365 subscriptions. This included a deal worth £54,300 with Suffolk County Council.

The G-Cloud procurement scheme is designed to decrease overhead costs to IT departments as well as send more business the way of SMEs. Last week at the government’s Think G-Cloud event, the Home Office revealed that 62 percent of the G-Cloud spend has gone to SMEs.

V3 contacted the Cabinet Office for more insight into the latest figures, with regards SME spend, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

In the midst of perennial “under-use” of G-Cloud, the Home Office also insisted that public sector bodies had to take the scheme “more seriously” and encouraged IT spenders to “take a risk” on the platform.

Microsoft has been given the go-ahead to build a massive $700m data centre facility in the rural US.

The Des Moines Register said that Iowa state authorities have approved a $20m tax credit plan, which would clear the way for the Redmond giant to begin work on its new data centre facility. The facility would be housed just outside the state’s capital city in West Des Moines.

While specifics on the data centre itself were not given, the report said that Microsoft’s total investment in the project could top $1bn.

The move adds Microsoft to a growing list of firms that have chosen the largely rural state as the site for a new data centre facility. With favourable tax policies and cheap land costs, Iowa houses large data centre facilities for Google and Facebook as well.

The state is also getting the thumbs-up from green technology advocates due to its heavy use of wind power plants. With energy-hungry data centres increasingly being built, environmental groups have pressured firms to choose locations that favor green energy sources over coal in local power plants.

While data centres in the US have largely been installed in more remote rural locations, many firms in the UK have chosen locations within London itself. The plan has drawn some criticism from opponents who claim that infrastructure and security concerns could arise when data centres are installed within a large city.