Microsoft and IBM have announced a partnership that will see their respective enterprise software services available on Azure and IBM Cloud services.
Robert LeBlanc, SVP of software and cloud for IBM, said: "Together we are creating new opportunities to drive innovation in hybrid cloud.
"This agreement reinforces IBM’s strategy in providing open cloud technology for the enterprise. Clients will now gain unprecedented access to IBM’s leading middleware and will have an even greater level of choice over the tools that they use to build and deploy their cloud environments."
IBM and Microsoft will make middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, and DB2 available on Azure, with Windows Server and SQL Server being offered on IBM Cloud.
Scott Guthrie, executive VP of cloud at Microsoft, said: "Microsoft is committed to helping enterprise customers realize the tremendous benefits of cloud computing across their own systems, partner clouds and Microsoft Azure.
"With this agreement more customers will be able to take advantage of the hyper-scale, enterprise performance and hybrid capabilities of Azure."
IBM will also expand support of its software running on Windows Server Hyper-V, and the companies plan to make IBM Pure Application Service available on Azure.
