Oracle Buddies Up With IBM On Enterprise Apps

Oracle is showing a healthy respect for the IBM constituency it picked up in its buyout of PeopleSoft/JD Edwards.

On Monday the company made available a DB2 plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control. This software, as its name implies, keeps watch over applications and services, gathering configuration data, tracking configuration changes, sounding alerts based on pre-set triggers.

Oracle already fields analogous plug-ins for EMC's Celerra NAS environment and Microsoft's .Net stack.

Since Oracle completed its $11 billion-plus buyout of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, both of which support many customers running IBM databases and middleware, the database giant has moderated its previously strident anti-IBM tones.

In fact, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has pretty much promised to make his company's wares play nicely with WebSphere middleware and DB2 database even though just months before he had characterized IBM as arch rival. He has since started to characterize SAP, with its huge enterprise application stable, as arch-nemesis.

Oracle also said it will strengthen an alliance with IBM and IBM's SMB reseller channel to push JD Edwards applications. A good chunk of those legacy applications run on IBM's iSeries (aka AS/400) turnkey systems.

These alliances show just what strange bedfellows technology can make. IBM and Oracle are sworn competitors in databases and Ellison has been known to make unkind remarks about IBM Global Services (IGS), the company's huge service and consulting arm, even though IGS fields an Oracle practice. Ellison has said that his own company's software stack obviates the need for such time-consuming, and often costly, implementation services.