Oracle has recently made some significant announcements surrounding their partnership with Amazon Web Services. Oracle solutions can now be deployed on Amazon's EC2 through a new licensing agreement.Why is this important?For starters, it reflects well on AWS to form an association with a well known database vendor. It also demonstrates that cloud computing is gaining a lot of traction in the market. As Oracle expands their cloud solution portfolio, adoption is set to increase dramatically as it becomes easier for enterprise-class customers to to take the leap of faith. Oracle's efforts to give their customers options is commendable. The announcement facilitates a strategic play to successfully provide their enterprise applications in the cloud.After taking a peek at the Oracle OpenWorld exhibitors this week in San Francisco, it's clear that Oracle has an impressive array of partners and no shortage of customers judging from the 42,000 attendees. These customers can now license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in a cloud computing environment.In order to not be shut out by emerging cloud start-ups, I think we'll see many more vendor partnerships like this in the near future.