In an article for Techcrunch.com, Frederic Lardinois examines the announcement from Microsoft and Oracle of a new strategic alliance. The agreement will see the two companies connect their clouds over a direct network connection; allowing users to move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
This is a logical step for Oracle, who has been investing heavily in its Cloud Applications in recent years. Leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is an astute way of increasing scale to the Oracle cloud services proposition.
Lardinois recognizes that the alliance presents an opportunity for both Microsoft and Oracle to do what they do best. Microsoft will still get to run the workloads and Oracle will benefit from its users being able to run services like JD Edwards, E-Business etc. on Azure; whilst still being able to use Oracle databases in the Oracle Cloud.
“Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades. With this alliance, 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.”
Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The announcement is the latest in a sequence of strategic moves by Microsoft that include enterprise alliance agreements with the likes of SAP, Adobe and Sony. What makes this one slightly unusual is that it is an agreement between competing clouds. However, while Oracle is keen to establish its credentials as a major cloud service provider, it recognizes it isn’t likely to get to the size of an AWS, Azure or Google Cloud anytime soon.
The direct interconnection between the two clouds is currently limited to the US, with plans to expand to other regions in the future. Going forward, Azure will provide support for a wide range of Oracle applications, including JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail and Hyperion.
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