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Oracle hitches cloud fortunes to Azure

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Johannesburg, 07 Jun 2019
Oracle and Microsoft look to collaborate in the cloud.
Oracle and Microsoft look to collaborate in the cloud.

In an unexpected move, Microsoft and Oracle this week announced an interoperability partnership between Azure and Oracle Cloud, meaning that customers can run workloads between the two.

They can also take advantage of the two vendors’ services, such as Oracle’s Autonomous database, and Azure’s Analytics and AI, offering a ‘best-of-both-clouds experience’, according to a press release on Wednesday.

The release said ‘lift and improve’ migrations between the clouds could now be carried out seamlessly and that the deal means customers can extend their on-premises data centres to both clouds.

There will also be supported deployment of Oracle apps on Azure, such as PeopleSoft and Oracle Retail, for example, with Oracle databases supplied by Oracle Cloud. The same Oracle apps can also be run on Azure.

The interconnect deal is now available in Ashburn (North America) and Azure US East, with plans to expand in EMEA and JAPAC in the future.

Growing customer base

Microsoft stock rose 2.2% on Thursday, while Oracle added 0.2%.

According to analyst firm Canalys, AWS is the top provider of cloud services, and has 31.7% of market share, followed by Azure at 16.8%. Google is in third place, with 8.5% market share.

Oracle has not been able to become a significant cloud player, although the deal will mean it can now grow its customer base. Microsoft, meanwhile, will be able to gain access to Oracle’s database customers.

“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 VP 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.”

“Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades,” said Don Johnson, executive VP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“With this partnership, our joint customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the cloud without having to re-architect anything, preserving the large investments they have already made.”

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