IT Voice News: Microsoft and IBM are arch rivals these days. Even though they are rivals, they have a past history following which they share a certain amount of mutual interest. Now they are forging a cloud compatibility partnership.
As claimed by both the companies, they are collaborating with each other so that their database runs on both the IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure supports IBM’s Web Sphere Liberty application server platform, MQ middleware, IBM’s Pure Application Service and DB2 database, while IBM Cloud will support Windows Server and SQL Server. Furthermore, the companies are also collaborating to offer Microsoft’s .NET runtime for IBM Cloud, which is the new cloud development platform. IBM Cloud supports Microsoft’s Hyper-V and it will also provide extended support to the virtualization platform in the Windows server.
As revealed by research director at Gigaom Research, Andrew Brust, IBM Cloud runs ample amount of Hyper-V instances. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are known to be the largest providers of cloud infrastructures across the world but IBM’s Soft Layer poses huge competition for all the leading players. Nadella announced that Microsoft’s cloud business is estimated at $4.4 billion, which is still a very small fraction of their total revenue. IBM also announced that their cloud infrastructure is estimated at $3.1 billion and the business has increased almost by 50 per cent. Last year, Microsoft entered a partnership with Oracle and recently they announced another most unexpected cloud partnership with Salesforce.com. The company has struck a deal with Dell too to deliver its latest Cloud Platform System.
In a conversation with Redmond Magazine, a Microsoft spokeswoman responded to some questions on availability of IBM’s software on Azure. The spokeswoman confirmed the reports and said that customers are going to benefit from the virtual machines which have IBM software. She also confirmed that Windows Server and SQL Server are already available for use on IBM Cloud.
