Oracle has unveiled a number of new cloud computing products and services, claiming that firms could now use Amazon's computing on demand systems to run many of its popular applications and build new ones.

Oracle said yesterday that firms could now license its Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager applications over Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The company has also introduced a secure backup module for Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) which, combined with EC2, would let developers rapidly build applications in an open way and at a lower cost and risk, according to Oracle.

"Providing choice is the foundation of Oracle's strategy to enable customers to become more productive and lower their IT costs - whether it's choice of hardware, operating system, or on demand computing - and extending this to the cloud environment is a natural evolution," said Robert Shimp, vice president at Oracle's Global Technology Business Unit.

"We are pleased to partner with Amazon Web Services to provide our customers with enterprise-class cloud solutions using familiar Oracle software on which their businesses depend."

To make it easier for firms to deploy Oracle solutions onto EC2 the firm has also released a set of free Amazon Machine Images, which it said would deploy its applications on virtual machines "within minutes".

The move reflects an increased industry push to offer low-cost, high computing functionality in a virtual environment.

IBM announced yesterday that it will offer test drives of Microsoft's new High Performance Computing Server 2008.