Proving yet again that leadership in the Cloud and AI Wars requires not only brilliant technology but also groundbreaking go-to-market approaches, Google Cloud and Oracle have extended their leads atop the AI Revolution with their agreement to offer Gemini services through the Oracle Cloud.
This customer-centric advance will prove to be extremely important not only because it gives those customers faster and simpler access to high-value innovation, but also because it will almost certainly inspire — force? — other Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors to disrupt their traditional routes to market as well.
And the overall results will be fantastic for enterprise customers: not just more choices and more openness and more possible combinations, but also less integration, less complexity, less rigidity, and less fear of lock-in.
In a minute, I’ll share some exclusive perspectives from both Oracle and Google Cloud on what this partnership means for customers, but first, here’s a quick recap of what the deal covers taken from a joint announcement made by the two companies:
Oracle and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to offer customers access to Google’s most advanced AI models, starting with Gemini 2.5, via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service. Oracle customers can now utilize the latest Gemini models to build AI agents for a wide range of use cases including multimodal understanding, advanced coding and software development tasks, productivity and workflow automation, and research and knowledge retrieval.
Oracle plans to make Google’s entire range of Gemini models available via OCI Generative AI service through new integrations with Vertex AI, including cutting-edge models for video, image, speech, and music generation and specialized industry models like MedLM.
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The joint announcement included brief comments from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure president Clay Magouyrk.
Kurian: “Today, leading enterprises are using Gemini to power AI agents across a range of use cases and industries. Now, Oracle customers can access our leading models from within their Oracle environments, making it even easier for them to begin deploying powerful AI agents that can support developers, streamline data integration tasks, and much more.”
Magouyrk: “Oracle has been intentional in offering model choice curated for the enterprise, spanning open and proprietary models. The availability of Gemini on OCI Generative AI service highlights our focus on delivering powerful, secure, and cost-effective AI solutions that help customers drive innovation and achieve their business goals.”
I really like the focus from each executive on helping generate better business outcomes, shorter time to innovation for customers, and providing more and simpler choices for customers.
And those impacts won’t be felt somewhere out on the fringes of an enterprise — they’re central to what has become a top CEO priority: harnessing the power of agentic AI to accelerate operations, drive better decisions, and create new growth opportunities.
Looking for some additional context in those areas, I reached out to both Oracle and Google Cloud for some additional insights on (a) how this groundbreaking deal will help drive better business outcomes for joint customers and (b) how the expanded partnership reflects the go-to-market outlooks for Google Cloud (#2 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking) and Oracle (#3).
I asked (via email) Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud President for Global Partner Ecosystem to describe his company’s commitment to driving customer success via partnerships that not so long ago would have been considered unthinkable.
“Our goal is to help organizations lead in their industries by confidently adopting generative AI at scale,” Ichhpurani said.
“This partnership with Oracle reflects Google Cloud’s core strategy of meeting customers where they are, making our AI models accessible to enterprises wherever they operate. Now, it’s even easier to bring Google’s powerful Gemini models to services Oracle customers already use, like the OCI Generative AI service.”
In the same vein of deploying go-to-market motions that just a year or two ago would have been unfathomable, I asked Ichhpurani if Oracle salespeople would be offering Google Cloud Gemini services to customers.
“Through our partnership with Oracle, we are focused on making world-class AI accessible and easy to adopt,” Ichhpurani said.
“With Gemini now available from both Oracle and Google Cloud sales teams, customers have greater flexibility in how they acquire our AI tools. Oracle customers can now leverage their Oracle Universal Credits to tap into the power of Gemini, all while being supported by Google Cloud’s comprehensive training and enablement resources.”
And in an email exchange with Oracle Senior Director of Product Marketing, Federico Torreti, I asked about the mindset Oracle is hoping to shape among customers as they view this Gemini partnership in the broader context of the Oracle-Google Cloud multi-cloud partnership launched 10 months ago.
“Oracle’s goal is to provide customers with a carefully curated portfolio of the most capable generative AI models for enterprise applications,” Torreti said.
“Oracle is AI-agnostic — we offer whatever’s best, not just what we’ve built. This latest partnership with Google to offer their groundbreaking Gemini models is the latest testament to our AI strategy.
“Additionally, partnerships with Google Cloud and other hyperscalers help eliminate data gravity barriers, enabling enterprises to run mission-critical AI workloads where their data resides. We’re very much anchored around partnering with leading AI innovators to help customers achieve their business goals.”
I also asked Torreti about the fairly head-spinning notion in which salespeople of two companies that compete savagely against each other in some market segments will now, in other segments, be offering each other’s products.
“Google Gemini will be offered on the OCI price list,” Torreti said.
“Customers will be able to use their Oracle Universal Credits to purchase Gemini via OCI Generative AI service.”
Final Thought
While Microsoft (#1 on the Cloud Wars Top 10) and AWS (#4) have much larger cloud businesses than Google Cloud and Oracle, the latter two are growing more rapidly, have huge future pipelines, and have shown more nimbleness and boldness in devising and executing customer-centric rather than vendor-centric go-to-market approaches.
In the Cloud Wars, size definitely matters — let’s not kid ourselves about that. But some of that mass is tied to the past, and my focus is much more on how tech vendors are helping customers create their AI-powered futures rather than how they’re perfecting their pasts.
We’ve seen how both Google Cloud and Oracle have leapfrogged AWS on the strength of their vision and bold partnership moves and their shared focus on the future. So unless #1 Microsoft wants to be leapfrogged by the two smaller but faster-growing disruptors, then Microsoft is going to have to find new ways to meet the emerging needs of customers moving into a future unlike anything they’ve ever experienced.
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