Oracle, Veritas Expand Database, Storage Pact.

Oracle continued to expand its cooperation with storage vendors on Tuesday when the company disclosed plans to work more closely with Veritas. Officials of Oracle, in Redwood Shores, Calif., and Veritas Software, in Mountain View, Calif., said at a Veritas-sponsored event here in Anaheim, Calif., that the two will expand their relationship to focus on increasing the reliability and availability for enterprise, e-business, and e-commerce applications. Veritas is a leading vendor of storage management software. Tuesday_s agreement is an expansion of a cooperative development agreement the two disclosed last January. The two companies will work together to expand their API activities to allow easier integration of their software products, said Mark Leslie, president and CEO of Veritas. The agreement removes some of the complexity VARs face when trying to integrate databases with storage, said Paul Sallaberry, vice president of worldwide field operations at Veritas. "Oracle and Veritas will be certifying certain configurations for certain [computing] loads," Sallaberry said. "If the reseller can look to Oracle and Veritas for advice, it can be a solution provider instead of a solution fullfiller. This can streamline the delivery process." Tuesday_s agreement comes exactly one week after Oracle and EMC, in Hopkinton, Mass., expanded their strategic relationship by agreeing to integrate their technology to support e-business applications. As part of that agreement, Oracle officials said the company will form an EMC strategic business unit and a joint development center to help integrate Oracle8i and EMC enterprise storage systems and software.