Software giant Oracle and cloud CRM company Salesforce.com will announce a new alliance next week that will see the two companies "unite" their respective clouds.
"Larry and I both agree we need to unite our clouds," said Marc Benioff, the founder and chief executive of Salesforce. "Oracle is a very important part of our strategy."
An alliance between the two companies would mark a sharp turnaround in rhetoric from the two companies after several years of increasingly vocal "trash talk" between their respective CEOs.
This culminated in October 2011, when Ellison effectively had Benioff kicked out of an Oracle conference that Salesforce had paid $1m for its CEO to speak at. That had followed criticism from Benioff about the on-stage performance of Ellison at the event.
However, while the two companies have competed aggressively and Ellison and Benioff have regularly traded insults, Salesforce has nevertheless remained dependent upon Oracle database technology at the heart of its cloud offering, despite making efforts to reduce its reliance on Oracle.
The deal with Salesforce will be one among a series of "startling" announcements that Oracle will make this week, which will also include a deal with Microsoft, according to Ellison.
"Next week we will be announcing partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS [software-as-a-service] companies in the cloud, and they will be committing to our 12C technology for years to come," said Ellison in a conference call.
