Microsoft and Oracle deepen cloud integration

Rival tech giants Microsoft and Oracle announced Thursday a deepening of their four-year-old cloud partnership, a reflection of how new technology and customer demand have led to more cooperation in the fiercely competitive software business.

Oracle will physically locate its Exadata hardware in Microsoft’s data centers, speeding up applications that customers use, the companies said. As a result, customers will have direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and deployed in Microsoft Azure data centers. Customers will be able to operate those Oracle services within Microsoft’s Azure Cloud dashboard, instead of having to run a separate Oracle dashboard.

The new interoperability will make it easier for Oracle users to run Microsoft Azure’s AI on top of the Oracle database, the companies said.

The integration will simplify the purchasing process from the user perspective, the companies said, because Azure customers will be able to use Oracle services even if they don’t have a separate Oracle account.

The Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure was announced last year but didn’t include the co-location of Oracle hardware in Azure data centers. It built on an integration introduced in 2019 known as Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, which required effort and technical expertise on the part of customers.

Customer previews of the new service, Oracle Database@Azure, will be available early next year in regions of the U.S., the U.K. and Germany, with plans to expand globally, the companies said. Oracle and Microsoft declined to disclose financial details of the plan.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella and Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison announced the new platform at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Companies often talk about the close relationship between AI and data, which is used to train models. In this instance, AI and data are coming together in a concrete way, according to Nadella.

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