Oracle’s Cloud Experience Center in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

Oracle and Microsoft’s cloud partnership took another step forward Tuesday. Oracle announced that its digital assistant can now be used within Microsoft Teams.

“Using Oracle Digital Assistant, business users can simply and conversationally interact with business applications directly from their Microsoft Teams interface just as they would collaborate with their fellow employees or other productivity tools,” Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle, said in a statement.

“This is yet another way we are enabling customers to run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft 365 and Oracle Cloud,” he added.

The idea is to increase productivity and decrease the amount of app-switching for enterprise users. Other out-of-the-box skills or chatbots for Oracle ERP Cloud will be available in Teams, the companies.

The integration builds off the new “multi-cloud alliance” between Oracle and Microsoft initially announced in June. The two longtime rivals are cozying up with their respective cloud products and services in part as a way for their customers to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor. In that way, the companies are effectively teaming up against their common competitors, the biggest of them being Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Previously: How Microsoft and Oracle became cloud buddies, and what’s next for their improbable partnership

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