After years of competition, Oracle teams up with Microsoft to bring its database software to the Windows cloud

https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud/entry/oracle_and_microsoft_join_forces
Starting now Oracle customers can run their databases and applications on Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Azure, not only with Oracle’s blessing but its certification.

Oracle and Microsoft have entered into a new partnership that will help customers embrace cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility in how to deploy Oracle software. 

Here are the key elements of the partnership:

• Effective today, our customers can run supported Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure
• Effective today, Oracle provides license mobility for customers who want to run Oracle software on Windows Azure
• Microsoft will add Infrastructure Services instances with popular configurations of Oracle software including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server to the Windows Azure image gallery
• Microsoft will offer fully licensed and supported Java in Windows Azure
• Oracle will offer Oracle Linux, with a variety of Oracle software, as preconfigured instances on Windows Azure

So what does this mean for Solaris? Solaris is no longer preferred platform for Oracle products:

1. Oracle internally run on Linux including their SaaS cloud offering

2. Oracle Exadata/Exalogic runs Linux (for 95%+ of installations)

3. Oracle partnership with Microsoft is based on Linux not Solaris x86

Oracle are not leading with Solaris then releasing Linux support thereafter. Oracle lead with Linux on all their strategic platforms, furthermore compute performance on low cost x86 platforms is  is sufficient for 99% of all enterprise workloads.

I would suggest that Oracle know the future of their applications stack is firmly on low cost commodity x86 servers. Will Solaris die a slow death?