Redmond, Washington & Redwood Shores, California, June 6, 2019: In a development that is seen as a formidable front to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. on Wednesday announced a Cloud interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
The two companies said in a joint press release that because of the Microsoft partnership with Oracle, enterprises could now “seamlessly connect Azure services, like Analytics and AI, to Oracle Cloud services, like Autonomous Database.”
By enabling customers to run one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within the Oracle Cloud, the partnership aims to deliver “a highly optimised, best-of-both-Clouds experience.”
“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 Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division, in the statement.
“The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for sales, service, marketing, human resources, finance, supply chain and manufacturing, plus highly automated and secure Generation 2 infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database,” said Don Johnson, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
As a result of this expanded partnership, the companies are today making available a new set of capabilities:
- Connect Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly, allowing customers to extend their on-premises datacenters to both clouds. This direct interconnect is available starting today in Ashburn (North America) and Azure US East, with plans to expand additional regions in the future.
- Unified identity and access management, via a unified single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning, to manage resources across Azure and Oracle Cloud. Also available in early preview today, Oracle applications can use Azure Active Directory as the identity provider and for conditional access.
- Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications (JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail, Hyperion) on Azure with Oracle databases (RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database) deployed in Oracle Cloud. The same Oracle applications will also be certified to run on Azure with Oracle databases in Oracle Cloud.
- A collaborative support model to help IT organizations deploy these new capabilities while enabling them to leverage existing customer support relationships and processes.
- Oracle Database will continue to be certified to run in Azure on various operating systems, including Windows Server and Oracle Linux.