Dell (DELL.DL) and Oracle (ORCL 0.22%) have reached an agreement to expand their strategic alliance in an effort to "deliver a holistic integrated, single vendor solution from purchase to support," the companies recently announced. The strategic partnership will combine hardware solutions from Dell and software from Oracle as part of a new "x86 infrastructure" to serve enterprise and data server customers of all sizes.

President of Dell Enterprise Solutions Marius Haas commented, "By combining Oracle's strong position in the database and business applications markets with Dell's leadership in industry-standard servers, datacenter storage and networking, we're combining the best of both worlds."

Oracle president Mark Hurd added, "This partnership with Dell is an extension of Oracle's engineered systems strategy where we simplify IT and reduce integration costs by delivering hardware and software together." In what will be a "unique arrangement in the industry," according to the announcement, Dell and Oracle have agreed to combine x86 infrastructure support functions, providing a single point of contact for customers.

The x86 infrastructure solution is expected to be available in the second half of 2013.