Dell and Oracle tighten their friendship

Vendors announce an expanded global alliance and a joint product offering to grab more customers

Oracle and Dell have expanded their global partnership to introduce a new x86 infrastructure that combines both sets of technology.

The two firms claim the offering, which combines Dell’s hardware with Oracle’s software, will allow firms to deploy and manage applications faster with increased performance, flexibility and value.

Under the agreement Oracle has named Dell as a preferred x86 partner and Dell has named Oracle as a preferred enterprise partner, including Oracle Linux.

And in a first for the industry, the two firms will streamline customer support offerings to provide a single point of contact from Dell.

Marius Haas, president of enterprise solutions at Dell, said: “Dell is growing fast in the datacentre and gaining market share across the world in our three core businesses. In part, this success is due to the fact we are focused on building and optimising Dell infrastructure to help customers run their core mission-critical workloads.

“This agreement with Oracle greatly expands this commitment. By combining Oracle’s strong position in the database and business applications markets with Dell’s leadership in industry-standard servers, datacentre storage and networking, we are combining the best of both worlds to deliver innovative solutions to customers that deliver superior performance, lower costs and increased value.”

Mark Hurd, president of Oracle, added: “This partnership with Dell is an extension of Oracle’s engineered systems strategy where we simplify IT and reduce integration costs by delivering hardware and software together. We believe that by working together, Dell will gain significant market share by delivering to its customers an integrated, optimised solution designed to deploy business critical applications. This is just the beginning of a lot of great things to come.”