Microsoft, Oracle deliver direct access to Oracle database services on Azure

Looking ahead to a future in which customers will move their entire data center workloads to the cloud, Microsoft and Oracle on Thursday expanded their partnership. Oracle is collocating its Oracle database hardware (including Oracle Exadata) and software in Microsoft Azure data centers, giving customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) via Azure.

“When a customer uses Microsoft technology, connected to Oracle technology, they’ll get best-in-class performance, reliability, and security,” Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said in a press conference Thursday afternoon.

Ellison says the offering, dubbed Oracle Database@Azure, will help many of its customers fully migrate from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.

“Everyone’s very excited about the cloud and has been talking about it for a long time, but actually a majority of the data has not migrated from on-premise into the cloud as yet, but it will,” Ellison said. “We’re trying to hasten that process to make it easier for customers to actually move their entire data center workload into the cloud.”

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella added that Oracle Database@Azure will not only help customers complete their transition to the cloud but also open new AI vistas as well.

“AI exists because of data,” he said. “You need to have access to data. And so to now have Oracle Database@Azure means we can take something like Azure OpenAI and take it to where the data is. Whether it is fine-tuning a model, pre-training a model, or meta prompting a model requires that low latency access to data. I think this is the moment where data and AI come together to transform businesses and business processes.”