Salesforce.com, Oracle partner in cloud

Big news in enterprise land today: sometime-rivals Salesforce.com and Oracle announced this morning a nine-year partnership to integrate their clouds.

The deal encompasses all three tiers of cloud computing: applications, platform and infrastructure.

For Salesforce's part, the company plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and Java Middleware Platform.

For Oracle's part, the company plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, as well as provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company.

"Larry and I both agree that Salesforce.com and Oracle need to integrate our clouds," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.

"Marc and I believe it's important that our two companies work together to make it happen," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said.

(It is at this point that you may pick up your slackened jaw from the ground.)

There are several points to take away from this. First, the cloud has to be interoperable, and that's why you're seeing this deal. Second, legacy vendors like Oracle have something newer vendors like Salesforce need, but also vice versa.

And finally, the announcement follows Ellison's compliment to Benioff and president Mark Hurd's promise of "startling announcements" during Oracle's recent earnings call. (The first: a deal with Microsoft.) We're seeing some of that today, and it appears to be dramatically changing the enterprise landscape.