Oracle and Microsoft expand partnership to its offer database services on Azure

Larry Ellison, CTO, Oracle

Taking a multi-cloud approach, Oracle is teaming up with Microsoft to offer its database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but deployed in Microsoft Azure datacenters. This comes less than a week after Oracle reported slowdown in quarterly cloud sales growth in the first quarter ended August 31.

Now, with Oracle Database@Azure, Microsoft will be the only other hyperscaler offering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) database services. This partnership will let customers use Oracle Database on OCI along with the services of Microsoft Azure including its AI offerings through Azure OpenAI.

“This combination provides customers with more flexibility regarding where they run their workloads. It also provides a streamlined environment that simplifies cloud purchasing and management between Oracle Database and Azure services,” Oracle said in a statement.

Speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the tech giant’s Redmond headquarters on September 15, Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO, said, “Two companies which are often competitors are cooperating for customer benefit. We are putting all of our technology together in one place in Azure datacenters to make it convenient and economical for the customers.”

The idea of this collaboration is also to speed up the customer’s journey of transitioning of storing data workloads on-premise to moving to cloud, Ellison said.  Customers will also be able to modernize their IT environments and use Azure’s infrastructure, tooling, and services.

Nadella said, “This is being built upon the work we did a few years ago. Larry has been pushing for focussing on latency…This new phase is about listening to customers. This will fundamentally exhilarate migration to cloud. In order to use AI, you want to have data which is on Oracle database, and now we have the best of both worlds.”

During its earnings on Monday, Ellison remained bullish saying that with the increasing demand from spurred by AI, companies have already signed “contracts to purchase more than $4 billion of capacity” from Oracle’s cloud service.

The company said that this figure is twice as much as Oracle booked at the end of the previous quarter, he said in the statement.

Though Oracle’s cloud revenue grew by 30 percent to $4.6 billion in Q1, it’s a slower growth rate as compared to the 54 percent jump in the last quarter. Cloud revenue has become a metric which is closely being tracked by investors.