Oracle and Microsoft announced a partnership Tuesday that will allow mutual customers to run workloads within both Azure and Oracle’s cloud, which could entice cloud holdouts to do some lifting and shifting.
The deal, which at launch only involves customers that want to run workloads on both Microsoft Azure’s US East data center and Oracle’s Ashburn, Va. data center, will allow companies that built Windows applications around Oracle databases to enjoy better performance in the cloud when migrating those applications. The partnership will expand to other regions in the future, the companies said in a press release.
Oracle’s cloud strategy — which is in a period of flux, shall we say — entices customers to run their database workloads on Oracle’s own cloud infrastructure. Big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft support running Oracle databases on their clouds, but Oracle tells customers that its databases work better when running on its own hardware.
So if you’re a company that uses Oracle’s cloud services to run your database, this partnership should deliver better performance for applications that are also using portions of Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure. It’s not clear how many companies this partnership will actually impact, but there are more companies running outdated application infrastructure than you might think, which is becoming very clear as the end-of-support deadline for Windows Server 2008 approaches.
