Mirantis, Inc. took the mantra “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” to a new extreme last week after announcing a partnership with Oracle Corp. which is traditionally of the most staunchly proprietary software vendors in the industry, to provide support for the latter’s cloud stack.

The move seems odd at first glance since the Mountain View startup fashions itself as the “number one” pure-play provider of software and services for OpenStack, a community-led project aimed at establishing a common standard for cloud environments. That goal runs counter to Oracle’s vertically integrated platform approach, which consists primarily of homegrown components. To make matters more confusing,  Oracle recently introduced its own distribution of the free platform that competes directly with that offered by Mirantis.

Yet the alliance nonetheless makes sense in the broader strategic context of efforts by Red Hat, Inc. to intensify its efforts to copy its success with Linux in the OpenStack community, which has already surpassed the operating system in terms of overall growth rate (Linux still has a much larger installed base). The company is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as a foundation for its OpenStack distro and delivering the two in a tightly integrated bundle that has been pre-validated and allows users to purchase support for both from the same vendor. Plus, it comes with out-of-the-box support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which is the firm’s commercial version of the KVM virtualization technology built into the Linux kernel.

That means Oracle and Mirantis  are essentially joining forces against a common enemy. Larry Ellison’s firm has a hypervisor and a Linux flavor (the latter admittedly being a slightly modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but lacks a field-hardened OpenStack distribution, while Mirantis is in the opposite situation.

Under the collaboration, Mirantis will act as a one-stop-shop for Oracle customers who want to jump on the open cloud bandwagon. The company plans to offer a commercial product-service bundle that will combine a subscription to Mirantis OpenStack with professional support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM courtesy of the database maker.

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