Two tech giants, Oracle's Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella, made a rare joint appearance on Thursday, revealing some intriguing insights.
Ellison shared that this visit marked his inaugural trip to Microsoft's home base in Redmond, Washington. He co-founded Oracle back in 1977 and remarked, "It's actually my first time in Redmond. It's hard to believe. I waited until very late in my career."
In his own interesting anecdote, Nadella recalled his first week at Microsoft in 1992 when he was tasked with convincing independent software vendors to adopt the Windows NT graphical operating system. He recalled thinking, "There's no way we can get ISVs onto Windows NT first without getting Oracle onto Windows NT."
The occasion for their joint appearance was to announce Oracle Database@Azure, an extension of their partnership that grants users direct access to Oracle database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) deployed in Microsoft Azure data centers. According to Microsoft, this collaboration makes them the only cloud provider, aside from Oracle, hosting Oracle's services.
Nadella emphasized the significance of this joint offering for advancing artificial intelligence (AI), stating, "Whether it is fine-tuning a model, pre-training a model, or meta-prompting a model, it requires low latency access to data. We're very excited because this is the moment where data and AI come together to transform businesses and business processes – there couldn't be a more profound timing for these two things."
Ellison noted during the event that customers appreciate seeing two rivals working together, even though their history includes some colorful episodes, like Ellison hiring private detectives to investigate groups potentially linked to Microsoft in the past.
In recent years, the two companies vied to become the technology provider for TikTok's parent company.
Last year, Nadella described the partnership as "a great opportunity for our partners" during a joint virtual appearance.
Ellison explained that the partnership aims to assist customers dealing with data straddling the cloud and on-premises environments. He stated, "A majority of the data has not migrated from on-premise into the cloud as yet – but it will. And we're trying to expedite that process to make it easier for customers to move their entire data center workload to the cloud, including all those Oracle databases currently on-premises."
For Microsoft, this partnership helps more customers transition to the cloud and harness AI capabilities if they wish, especially with Microsoft's involvement with OpenAI in the generative AI (GenAI) field.
Oracle Database@Azure promises the performance, scalability, and workload availability of Oracle Database on OCI while incorporating Azure's security, flexibility, and services, facilitating greater Azure OpenAI utilization. This collaboration provides users with a streamlined way to purchase and manage services from both companies, aiming to eliminate issues associated with managing multicloud architectures. The joint offering supports Oracle Exadata Database services, Oracle Autonomous Database services, and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
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