In June, Microsoft and Oracle jointly announced an industry-first multicloud collaboration. This collaboration enables customers to interconnect the two company’s clouds and simplify management for IT environments and individual applications that span both clouds. Since the announcement, we’ve been excited, but not surprised, by the volume of joint Microsoft and Oracle customers who are interested in creating innovative multicloud solutions.
To meet customer demand, we’re expanding availability to more regions. We’re excited to announce that today we’re extending this alliance to include interconnectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in London.
The Benefits of Cloud Proximity
The initial phase of our alliance enabled customers in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ashburn, Virginia, region to connect with resources in the Microsoft Azure US East region, also in Virginia. Connecting cloud regions that are physically close to each other makes the interconnection more useful. Closer cloud resources means less latency, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds, and supports a broader spectrum of workloads using resources on both sides. By enabling this interconnection in London, we’re opening the door for usage of this kind on a whole new continent.
What the Alliance Brings to the UK
London is one of the most active Oracle Cloud regions. A wide range of customers there deploy solutions that span mission-critical systems of record, cloud native deployments of innovative new solutions, and everything in between. By enabling a preconfigured, dedicated interconnection, common controls, integrated identity management, and support capabilities, we’re giving customers a roster of new services in Azure that they can use with the services that they use in our cloud. Similarly, the many Azure customers that run in the UK can now deploy proven Oracle databases and applications as cloud services, and connect those services to applications on Azure that run the Microsoft stack. Joint customers can create their ideal combination of services from each cloud, matching each part of their workload inventory to the optimal cloud for each, without added complexity or settling for an inferior environment for parts of what they run.
Coexistence in the Cloud Era
Use of both Oracle and Microsoft technologies is common in enterprise IT shops. Before the cloud era, these technologies could coexist effectively in customer data centers, with systems running each stack close enough for easy information exchange. The move to cloud broke this capability. Each vendor’s cloud was isolated from the others, making interchange between solutions on each difficult or impossible. For the first time in the cloud era, this alliance gives customers the ability to interconnect workloads from multiple vendors as they could in their own data centers. More multivendor solutions will be enabled by decoupled application architectures, common management frameworks, and better interconnection of networks. Multicloud is good for customers, and this partnership is a harbinger of good things to come.
