IBM and Oracle are deepening their four-decade strategic partnership with a new set of artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud initiatives aimed at helping enterprises accelerate digital transformation and scale AI across business operations.
Announced as the company's mark 40 years of collaboration, the expanded partnership focuses on delivering integrated solutions designed to address growing customer demand for flexible cloud infrastructure, intelligent automation, and secure data management in increasingly complex IT environments.
The move comes as enterprises continue to face challenges in scaling AI due to fragmented data ecosystems and disconnected cloud environments. According to research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, many organisations are struggling to integrate data and applications across cloud platforms, limiting their ability to automate processes and deploy AI consistently.
To address these challenges, IBM and Oracle are introducing a series of innovations spanning hybrid cloud infrastructure, AI-powered enterprise operations, and data security.
A key development will allow customers to directly purchase and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, simplifying deployment compared with the existing Bring Your Own Subscription model. The capability is expected to become available later in 2026.
In addition, Red Hat solutions are set to become available through the Oracle Marketplace later this year, enabling customers to use Oracle Universal Credits to purchase RHEL and deploy applications across hybrid cloud environments more efficiently.
The partnership is also extending into enterprise operations through a new connector being developed between Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and IBM Maximo Application Suite. The integration is designed to help customers leverage built-in AI and analytics to manage workflows across finance, procurement, assets and facilities.
IBM also plans to deliver IBM Envizi as a software-as-a-service offering on OCI, allowing organisations to manage environmental, social and governance data alongside operational and financial systems. The service is expected to launch first in Saudi Arabia.
Additional initiatives include expanded support for IBM Turbonomic on OCI to optimise compute, storage and network resources in real time, and enhanced support for IBM Guardium with Oracle’s high-performance Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure.
The new capabilities are expected to roll out later this year, underscoring the companies’ commitment to helping enterprises modernise operations and unlock greater value from AI and hybrid cloud technologies.
