- Microsoft and Oracle signed a surprise agreement in which the longtime rivals will work together to make their Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud platforms interoperable.
- That means developers can have software that runs from Microsoft Azure but connects to the Oracle Cloud to use Oracle's cutting-edge Autonomous Database technology.
- Microsoft's Scott Guthrie and Oracle's Don Johnson said that while the companies do often compete, lots of customers out there already use some combination of their products — and making their lives easier is mutually beneficial.
- "This is the start of a beautiful friendship," Johnson told Business Insider.
- Read more on Business Insider's homepage.
Microsoft and Oracle haven't always seen eye to eye — if absolutely nothing else, the two tech titans compete in the lucrative database market, where Oracle reigns supreme.
So it comes as a surprise that on Wednesday the two are expected to announce a cloud-computing team-up between the Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud platforms.
In short, the partnership will allow applications hosted on one cloud to use services hosted on the other, in any combination that the customer chooses. For example, a developer could run the bulk of their app on Microsoft Azure and then hook it up to Oracle's next-generation Autonomous Database, available only via the Oracle Cloud.
"This is the start of a beautiful friendship," Don Johnson, the executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Business Insider.
Scott Guthrie, the EVP of Microsoft's cloud and artificial-intelligence group, said that while Oracle may be a competitor in some ways, it's actually in the interest of both companies to work together here.
Many customers, especially large enterprises, are already using tech from both Microsoft and Oracle in some combination, Guthrie said. This joint solution is already being piloted by the grocery company Albertsons, the oilfield mega-conglomerate Halliburton, and the clothing retailer Gap.
What this partnership accomplishes, Guthrie said, is making life easier for those customers — and that makes it more likely that they'll purchase even more cloud services from Microsoft and Oracle. He said Microsoft Azure had already seen some success with a similar playbook by embracing integrations with sometimes-rivals, like the storage company NetApp or the virtualization giant VMware; giving those customers options didn't cannibalize Microsoft's own products, he said.
"It's not substitutive with our solutions," Guthrie said.
Similarly, Johnson said he believes the partnership will open up new capabilities for Oracle. There are customers out there who run key Oracle software, like its E-Business Suite, on Microsoft Azure but also want to take advantage of new Oracle tech like the Autonomous Database. The Microsoft partnership means a customer can use Oracle software running in Microsoft Azure, connected to an Oracle database running in the Oracle Cloud.
Again, Johnson said, it's good for both parties.
The executives also highlighted the technical wizardry that goes into making this work. Johnson said there was a "big fat pipe" of dedicated bandwidth between the two companies' platforms to make sure latency stays low and performance stays high. The two have also worked together on identity and security, to make sure a developer's data stays safe as it travels between Microsoft's data centers and Oracle's.
This partnership comes as both companies face increasing competitive pressure from Amazon Web Services, the retailer's massively profitable IT-services arm and the clear leader in the cloud-computing market. Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, has positioned the Oracle Autonomous Database as a major weapon against Amazon, even as Microsoft redoubles its efforts to catch up to first place.
However, the executives said this partnership was born not of any kind of rivalry, but rather a desire to better serve customers. It was that customer focus, Guthrie said, that drove the two to work together in the first place.
"When you put customers at the center," he said, "it makes the conversation really easy."
