The IT industry took another big leap towards the future yesterday as two previous competitors, Oracle Corp. and Salesforce.com, agreed to a nine year partnership with hopes in generating a more proficient cloud computing system.

 

This type of partnership will be a new experience for the two companies as Oracle will use it’s dominant workforce management software, which will combine Salesforces’s cloud products to Oracle’s operating system and database.   Oracle’s workforce software consists of management software in; enterprise resource planning, customer relations, and supply chain.  This software has made Oracle the third largest overall software producer behind Microsoft and IBM.  Salesforce has a popular customer relationship software of its own. In fact the software propelled the company to the number one slot in Forbes magazine for most innovative company in America.

 

 

Competition in the past between the two software companies has been present, as Salesforce has continuously been second to Oracle’s success.  Oracle was one of the few remaining non-cloud systems and it was only a matter of time before the giant made the transition to the new system.  The new cloud system will be more elastic, cost efficient, and manageable, increasing the productivity of any organization or company.

 

 

More than anything this partnership displays the need for interaction between companies within the IT industry.  As companies begin to network more accessibility will be brought to the industry as a whole. A perfect example of this would be if Oracle and Salesforce brought Java support to Windows Azure, one of the many results of this partnership.