Microsoft and Oracle reveal major cloud tie-up

Microsoft has announced plans to deepen its four-year-old partnership with rival cloud company Oracle, which will see the company host Oracle services.

The new Oracle Database@Azure will enable Oracle customers to migrate Oracle databases “as is” to OCI and deploy them in Azure alongside their current workloads in the Microsoft Cloud.

With the announcement, Microsoft becomes the only other cloud provider apart from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to host Oracle services as the pair look to increase their market share.

Azure can now host your Oracle services

Microsoft summarized in a press release: “Oracle Database@Azure delivers all the performance, scale, and workload availability advantages of Oracle Database on OCI with the security, flexibility, and best-in-class services of Microsoft Azure, including best-in-class AI services like Azure OpenAI.”

According to the latest Synergy statistics, Microsoft accounts for 22% of the cloud market, or twice as much as Google (at 11%). However, both trailed far behind Amazon, which consistently sits in the 32-34% band.

While Oracle did not even make it into the top five (which consisted of the three giants, Alibaba, and IBM), the partnership is likely to positively impact both companies’ figures.

Citing increasing multicloud adoption, Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison explained how both companies had collaborated in order to “make it easy for [multicloud] customers to seamlessly connect Azure Services with the very latest Oracle Database technology.”

The companies confirmed that customers will be able to purchase Oracle Database@Azure through Azure Marketplace using their existing Azure agreements, or they can choose to use their existing Oracle Database license, including Bring Your Own License and the Oracle Support Rewards program.

The services that Azure datacenters will support include the Oracle Exadata Database Service and the Oracle Autonomous Database. Initially launching across North America and Europe, plans to bring the shared hosting globally are already underway.