Microsoft and Oracle have extended their partnership with the launch of their joint cloud interconnect in Amsterdam.
Microsoft and Oracle announced their partnership for cloud applications in 2019, attracting a lot of attention and a lot of questions of what this meant for both companies.
So what does this mean for Microsoft and Oracle customers?
For organisations who are customers of both Microsoft and Oracle will be able to integrate data seamlessly between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud within regions that comply with the European Union data jurisdiction.
An example cited by Microsoft was the ability for a customer to be able to run Windows-based apps on Azure connected to Oracle’s Autonomous Database or Exadata on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
This will mean customers no longer have to keep entering passwords when accessing different sets of data and their cloud resources on each platform, making the access management process streamlined and simple to use.
“Our customers have understood what cloud means. They’ve made use of our cloud and some of our competitors’ clouds. It’s started to pique real interest in whether they can apply that to workloads,” said Andrew Sutherland, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud, EMEA, at the firm’s Oracle OpenWorld Europe (OOW) event in London, U.K. today.
Sutherland said that the creation of the service was to cater for customers who use both Azure and Oracle solutions, mentioning “Our job is to overcome the hurdles and we’re doing that at great speed.”
MESTEC, a provider of software for the manufacturing industry and key customer to both Microsoft and Oracle, announced how excited the company was about this extended partnership.
“We wanted to build a SaaS-based solution manufacturer could subscribe to. That’s done great things for our customers, but it pushed the responsibility for the resilience of the infrastructure onto us,” said Mark Carleton, chief operating officer (COO) of Mestec.
“The next generation was to move to PaaS. The obvious choice for us in terms of the database was Oracle Autonomous Database. We’ve also had experience in Microsoft.NET. We were able to port that to Azure in less than a day…We made those decisions before Oracle and Microsoft announced their partnership… It vindicated our decision.”
It’s not hard to see why customers have this view with the ‘extremely positive’ results thus far; a projected 50% reduction in infrastructure and management cost, and up to 500% performance increase.
Carleton continued: “By connecting Oracle and Azure, we’re able to rapidly introduce innovative technologies into our solution, ultimately resulting in a better, smarter solution for our customers enabling them to make dramatic improvements in manufacturing performance,”
Both Microsoft and Oracle have data centres in Amsterdam, with Oracle having its datacentre hub located there, making it an ideal place for this partnership to take effect.
Microsoft and Oracle mentioned plans to continue this partnership throughout other regions in Europe, Asia, and America.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this partnership will help increase their customers’ results and what this will mean for both companies in other areas apart from the Cloud in the future.
