Intel CEO Brian Krzanich showed up at Oracle’s tech conference to take the stage with CEO Mark Hurd. Intel and Oracle have been partners for decades but it seems that their common hatred of IBM might be drawing them together.

Biggish Blue flogged its Intel-based computer server business to Lenovo and is now concentrating on selling only the more expensive, higher-margin computer servers that use its own Power chip.

Apparently Oracle's head of engineering and products, Thomas Kurian, met with Intel's Software and Services Group to devise a cunning plan. Apparently it was the sort of plan which was so cunning that a team of foxes with a university degree in cunning would nod their heads and say “that really is cunning.”

The two companies set up something called Project Apollo. Apollo was famous for killing a giant snake so it made sense. In this case it involved setting up a joint team of engineers from both companies near Intel's facilities in Oregon.

Apollo team was told to set up massive cloud computing data centres that will run faster than anything else. The only limit was that it had to use Oracle hardware with Intel chips.

Apparently they managed to do that without needing to use the scissors or find a responsible adult to help them with the glue.

Hurd and Krzanich are using Apollo to launch a new partnership to target Oracle's database and software customers to ditch their IBM computer servers and buy Oracle/Intel servers instead.

It is an odd alliance really given that Oracle fastest, most expensive computer servers use Oracle's own chips, the SPARC chips technology that it gained when it bought Sun Micrososystems. For a while now Oracle has been dragging its feet on SPARC and occasionally has to issue denials that it is abandoning it.