Amazon adds Oracle support to EC2

Amazon said Monday that it will be adding various Oracle enterprise offerings to its cloud computing service, dubbed Elastic Compute Cloud.

The move will give Amazon's cloud services some serious enterprise heft. In a blog post, Amazon said it will offer EC2 services preloaded with Oracle's software--Enterprise Linux, Database 11g, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and developer tools--as well as support options. For Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2 there is a combo of the software giant's Unbreakable Support and Amazon's Premium Support.

The announcement comes amid the OpenWorld, a conference with thousands of Oracle customers. Although Monday's OpenWorld agenda seemed to focus on Oracle's Beehive--or at least trying to assess what it is--I'd rate Amazon's support as more important.

Also see: Oracle OpenWorld: a view from the cheap seats

Why? If there's any question that Amazon is serious about the enterprise this Oracle move would answer them. All Amazon would really have to do is add support to SAP and it could become an enterprise option. Amazon notes:

As more and more enterprises take a look at the Amazon Web Services, they invariably ask about packaged software, particularly databases. With this announcement, AWS users now gain access to a commercial-grade, brand-name database, along with the necessary tools and middleware needed to build and host heavy duty enterprise applications in the Amazon cloud.

Amazon is clearly targeting Oracle's database customers, but it wouldn't be much of a stretch to see applications added in the future.

Oracle is outlining its licensing scheme for the cloud and Amazon said other big software vendors may follow.

I'm going to check out Amazon's booth here and update in a bit.