Oracle and Intel jump on a cloud

Forget stargazing. Oracle and Intel are looking up at the clouds.

The technology giants announced Wednesday they're teaming up to accelerate cloud computing for corporate titans, collaborating on improving the efficiency, security, and standards-based technology for pushing programs and data storage into virtual clouds.

"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based," Robert Shimp, Oracle's technology business unit group vice president, said in a statement.

As part of the cloudy collaboration, Oracle and Intel will continue their efforts to improve the performance of Oracle's software on Intel chips. Recently, the companies said, their teaming up of Oracle VM and the Xen open-source hypervisor with Intel VT produced a 17 percent performance improvement in virtualized Oracle databases running on Intel's Xeon processors.

On the security front, both companies aim to improve the integration of their data encryption technologies for customers using shared cloud computing. They also will work with other industry players in enabling portability of virtual machine images and creating Web services standards for securing and managing cloud-based services.