Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dissect the pivotal partnership between tech giants Microsoft and Oracle.
Highlights
00:33 — Oracle and Microsoft expanded their multi-cloud partnership here to include more regions around the world and more services. Microsoft had initially ordered 20 Oracle cloud data centers, to be built within Azure data centers. Recently, it’s added three more.
01:52 — Look at what’s going on here. You’ve got Microsoft and Oracle who compete savagely in a lot of areas. Microsoft is now Oracle’s largest customer. They went past the old traditional models about competition and are instead creating new ways of going to market and working together.
02:43 — Azure now becomes a major sales channel for Oracle. This is Microsoft Azure, which has lots and lots of services that compete directly against Oracle. But this is now something where the two companies decided, we’re going to do what’s best for customers.
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03:09 — The Oracle Database@Azure has been a boon for the Azure business. Every cloud vendor is going to take a look at “What am I doing now based on competitive issues?” and “What am I not doing now based on ‘Well, if I do that it might benefit a competitor here . . . no matter what happens, I’ll never do any business with this competitor.'”
04:34 — Oracle’s sales are rising, Microsoft’s sales are rising, and customers are getting something that they’ve wanted for decades. I think it’s going to pull a lot of the other major cloud vendors along to create more high-benefit, high-impact programs for customers, where competitors work together further to deliver that.
05:01 —It’s fascinating to think that the two companies leading this latest cloud revolution are Microsoft and Oracle, so often referred to as legacy, out-of-touch companies. In fact, it took two companies, both about half a century old, to come up with this very new and different idea that’s going to drive enormous value for customers.
