Announce last year the deal between the two rivals, Microsoft and Oracle, allows Oracle apps to be certified to run on Windows Server, Hyper-V and Windows Azure is being cemented by the software becoming available on Windows Azure as of March 12, 2014. Currently Microsoft hasn’t been charging for Oracle software running on Azure as it was not the final code. However as of March Microsoft will start to charge for the “license-included” Oracle software.

The pricing page states, “Beginning March 12, we will charge for the Oracle software running in license-included Oracle VMs in addition to our charge for the Windows Server VMs in which the Oracle software runs. Prices are listed as hourly rates, and we will bill for the Oracle software based on the total number of minutes that your license-included Oracle VMs run during a billing cycle. Additional VM charges will be incurred based on the size and type of underlying VM you are running. After the preview period ends, any license-included Oracle VMs that remain deployed will automatically be billed at the new rates.”

The pricing, shown in the figure below, is for the Oracle software only and does not include the cost of the Virtual Machine it runs on as that is billed separately.

Now this may seem like a case of “strange bedfellows” but it is following a logical trend in the further development of “the cloud”. Microsoft is simply acknowledging that the number of systems and software required by an exploding number of technology centric companies means they need to reach out to a much broader audience. It used to be that they focused only on enterprise employed professional coders as their main focus, but the community of developers has grown and the range of languages, frameworks and tools has grown as well.

This is why Tim O’Brian, Microsofts General Manager for Platform Strategy, suggests that the best approach for the software giant is to embrace and invest in non-Microsoft technologies and ecosystems.

So the inclusion of Oracle apps is just another of a long list of tools and platforms Microsoft intends to provide support for in their server and cloud products. For some companies, even those with on-premise or local data center deployments, this gives them even more options for utilizing these powerful software applications affordably and with a bit more flexibility in hosting and developing for Oracle apps.

Making moves like this to different environments takes a great deal of expertise though in both the software applications and the hosting environments they live in. There are a number of firms who have deep expertise in both Oracle and the dozens of server and cloud options for hosting. Consulting one of these firms could save you a headache or two and some precious budget dollars.