During the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, the company announced a deal that will enable its users to run certain Oracle products on Amazon’s cloud computing environment.

Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of development, explained that Amazon was first considered for the partnership because of its head start in supplying cloud computing services. Oracle’s customers will be able to license the Oracle 11g database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Linux to be used in the Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. He explained that the deal’s goal is to enable customers, partners, and Oracle to use EC2 and S3 easily in conjunction with Oracle's database and middleware products.

Mr. Rozwat only referred to the above mentioned applications and also refused to offer any other concrete information. He explained that his position is the standard company practice and new data will be presented in the weeks to come. "Across all our products, we talk about general directions but we try to avoid giving very specific features or specific dates," he said. "If you look at all our presentations this week, you really won't see anything too far into the future that starts giving feature lists or product names. ... We're treating Fusion applications no different than any other product in that regard."

The plan is to make the offer available in early 2009 and Oracle is also looking for other cloud computing environments, which will be presented in the future.

Oracle managed to make 50 acquisitions in less than 48 months, in an effort to build its database and a complete set of applications and products.