Microsoft and Oracle are set to reveal details of a new partnership on Monday, one of a "startling series" of announcements Oracle CEO Larry Ellison promised next week around the Oracle Database 12c.

Oracle will be announcing next week technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS (software as a service) companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud, who will be committing to Oracle technology "for years to come," Ellison told analysts during an earnings call on Thursday. He added that Oracle will announce partnerships with companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft, but did not provide further details.

Many of the SaaS vendors, including NetSuite and Salesforce.com, have long used Oracle's database to build their services, and will likely upgrade to 12c. Microsoft offers its competing SQL Server database in many markets. A preview of SQL Server 2014 will be availableby the end of the month and the full production version will be available for purchase in early 2014.

The company now expects the 12c to be the "foundation of a modern cloud" with multi-tenancy capability at the database layer, thus avoiding the overhead of getting multi-tenancy through virtual machines or security issues that arise from a multi-tenanted application architecture. Some companies built multi-tenancy into the application to run a lot of customers' data on a small number of servers, and do that economically, he said. The multi-tenancy capability in 12c will be a separately priced option.

Oracle's president Mark Hurd, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, Microsoft's president for the server and tools business, are slated to address the press teleconference on Monday. Microsoft hosts its developer conference in San Francisco next week.

Oracle reported Thursday that its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of US$10.9 billion was flat year-on-year, while profit rose 10 percent to $3.8 billion.