Microsoft has announced a deal which will see the company bring support for Oracle products on its Hyper-V and Windows Azure cloud platforms.

The companies said that the deal will allow Hyper-V and Azure to support Oracle Database, Java and WebLogic Server platforms as well as Oracle’s Linux build. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Microsoft is deeply committed to giving businesses what they need, and clearly that is the ability to run enterprise workloads in private clouds, public clouds and, increasingly, across both,” said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

“Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years.”

The move marks an uncharacteristic truce between Microsoft and Oracle. The two firms have long been at odds with one another and Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has a history of criticising Redmond’s policies.

In making a deal, analysts see the two companies putting aside their differences to deal with the realities of business in the 21st century.

“Larry Ellison had been adamant against working with Microsoft for years and I think he realized that both companies now face bigger threats from cloud services than they do from each other,” explained Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.

“Microsoft had always tried to work with Oracle, and Oracle support folks often had secret relationships with Microsoft for the benefit of mutual customers but now that all comes out of the closet.”

The move also signifies what is likely to be a growing trend in the enterprise IT space. Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King told V3 that such partnerships will become increasingly vital for large vendors.

“It behooves companies to partner with as many other companies as they can,” King explained.

“We are not looking at a future cloud that is going to be as amenable to single player dominance that past markets have been.”

The move brings a formidable competitor to Amazon Web Services for Oracle’s business. The AWS platform had previously been the only cloud infrastructure as a service platform to support many of Oracle’s offerings.

King said that providing the choice between AWS and Azure will help Oracle avoid alienating customers who are heavily invested in one cloud service over the other.

“When you look at strategic partnerships, very often they come around because vendors look around and realise if they cut themselves off from too much of the market, customers that want to use AWS or Azure will go to someone else,” King said.