IBM and Microsoft have pledged to make their technologies interoperable in the cloud for the sake of their users despite the tech giants being fierce rivals in the market for cloud computing services,

Yesterday, the companies announced that many Microsoft enterprise products would run on IBM’s infrastructure and platform services, and that many key IBM middleware products would be available for use on Microsoft Azure.

“The cloud is an interesting change in the technology landscape. In a lot of ways it opens everybody up to be your partner as well as your competitor, more so than on-premise software did in the past,” said Michael Curry, IBM vice president of WebSphere product management. “The key element here is about offering choice for our customers – to have the flexibility to deploy software in lots of different places.”

IBM middleware such as WebSphere application server, the Websphere MQ messaging bus and the DB2 database will be made available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, while Microsoft’s Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered as part of the IBM Cloud set of infrastructure services, and the Microsoft .NET runtime will be offered on IBM’s Bluemix platform service.

SOURCE: cio.co.uk