Microsoft has just announced a partnership with Oracle to enable cloud interoperability between the tech giant’s Azure and Oracle’s Cloud hosting solution. Customers of the services from both companies can now take advantage of being able to migrate and run their data workloads between Azure and Oracle Cloud.
Microsoft’s blog post explains that users will be able to connect certain services of Azure to those of Oracle cloud, giving them the best experiences from both providers for enhanced optimization. Oracle, which faces stiff competition from other larger-name cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and its new partner Azure, will be able to focus what it is best known for while allowing organizations to offset much of their workload in Azure.
“As the cloud of choice for the enterprise, with over 95% of the Fortune 500 using Azure, we have always been first and foremost focused on helping our customers thrive on their digital transformation journeys,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division. “With Oracle’s enterprise expertise, this alliance is a natural choice for us as we help our joint customers accelerate the migration of enterprise applications and databases to the public cloud.”
Customers will be able to run Oracle’s various packaged applications—JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail, Hyperion—on either Azure with one of its databases—RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database—which Microsoft says will be certified to run in Azure with Oracle databases in Oracle Cloud. Additionally, Oracle Database will also continue to be certified to run on either Windows Server or Linux in Azure.
Customers will be able to seamlessly connect the two cloud companies’ services together, although in the meantime this functionality is limited to Azure’s US East datacenter along with Oracle’s Ashburn servers in North America, with additional regions planned further down the road. They will also be able to take advantage of a single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning for managing resources across both platforms.
