Microsoft and Oracle continue to deepen their collaboration. Oracle customers can now run their databases in the Azure cloud with minimal latency.

Following a teaser earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his Oracle colleague Larry Ellison sat side by side to announce a new shared service: Oracle Database@Azure. You can interpret this name very literally, because this offering brings Oracle’s database servers into Azure data centers.

As was the case a few years ago in the TikTok affair, Microsoft and Oracle are primarily competitors in the public cloud market, but both companies still seem to sympathize with each other. In the summer of 2022, Oracle announced the possibility of running its cloud software via Azure. The integration between the Oracle and Microsoft clouds becomes even stronger with this new announcement.

latency

During the announcement, Nadella struck a nerve: Latency. The connection between Oracle servers and Azure is intended to give a boost to companies looking to develop AI models, an area where Microsoft wants to be the cloud partner of choice for every company.

The data to train the models has to come from somewhere and moving data from one server to another involves latency. If your Oracle server is already located in Microsoft’s data center, this latency can be reduced to (almost) 0.0 milliseconds.

With this offer, Ellison also hopes to convince the last stubborn on-premise customers to use the cloud. “The majority of data has not yet migrated from on-premises to the cloud – but it will happen. “We are trying to accelerate this process to make it easier for customers to move all Oracle databases that are currently on-premises to the cloud,” the Oracle CEO said.

You will find out in more detail later how exactly the Oracle Database@Azure offer is designed and what tariffs apply. That could happen next week during Oracle Cloudworld. As a preview, you can watch the press conference in full length on YouTube.