Oracle Corp. dropped a bombshell today with the news that it has put aside its longstanding differences with Amazon Web Services Inc., forming a “strategic partnership” with its former enemy to bring its Autonomous Database offering to the world’s biggest cloud infrastructure platform.
The announcement ahead of Oracle Cloud World this week in Las Vegas came as the database giant also revealed its database services are now generally available on the world’s second- and third-biggest clouds – Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
With the launch of Oracle Database@AWS, customers will be able to access the Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle Exadata Database Service on dedicated infrastructure on AWS. The new offering is meant to provide customers with a “unified experience” between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and AWS, simplifying aspects such as database administration and billing, plus joint customer support.
Another advantage for users is they’ll be able to bring their data running on Oracle’s databases to applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, plus AWS’ analytics and artificial intelligence services, including Amazon Bedrock.
The companies said the partnership marries Oracle’s unparalleled expertise in data management with the agility, flexibility and security of AWS, with the services set to launch in general availability before the end of the year.
Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (pictured), who has made repeated digs at AWS during his keynotes over the years, said today that Oracle is seeing “huge demand” from customers that want to use multiple clouds.
“To meet this demand and give customers the choice and flexibility they want, Amazon and Oracle are seamlessly connecting AWS services with the very latest Oracle Database technology, including the Oracle Autonomous Database,” he said.
AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman also weighed in, saying that many of the world’s largest and most security-sensitive organizations have already chosen to deploy Oracle’s software on AWS, so it makes sense to formalize a partnership. “This new, deeper partnership will provide Oracle Database services within AWS to allow customers to take advantage of the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of the world’s most widely adopted cloud alongside enterprise software they rely on,” he said.
Besides the unified experience, which will see customers allowed to manage their Oracle databases from the AWS Cloud Console, other benefits include low-latency connectivity, thanks to a high-speed interface between Oracle’s software and AWS applications, ensuring better performance and more scalability for workloads.
In addition, the integration eliminates the need for extract, transform and load processes, allowing data to flow between Oracle databases and AWS apps with zero hassles.
Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE Media’s sister organization theCUBE Research, said today’s announcement was long overdue, given that Oracle is No. 1 in the world in terms of running mission-critical databases, and AWS has by far the most popular cloud infrastructure.
“The friction customers had to go through to run Oracle on AWS was not insurmountable but certainly unnecessary, so it’s a real positive for customers that Oracle Database will now be a first class citizen on AWS,” Vellante said. “This will be a far superior experience because Oracle customers can now much more easily take advantage of AWS cloud native services from infrastructure to AI tooling. Win for customers and win for both AWS and Oracle.”
Writing in Forbes, analyst Steve McDowell of NAND Research Inc. said the partnership is part of a broader trend towards multicloud adoption in the industry, with almost every enterprise today relying on multiple cloud companies to optimize performance, balance risk and ensure regulatory compliance.
“The Oracle Database@AWS announcement is a strategic move for both Oracle and AWS,” McDowell said. “For Oracle, it enhances the accessibility and adoption of its database services. For AWS, it expands its portfolio to attract new enterprise customers. For the cloud computing market, the collaboration is a strong step towards simplifying management and reducing operational complexity.”
Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure partnerships accelerate
The partnership with AWS is the latest evolution of Oracle’s cloud strategy, following in the wake of earlier tie-ups with Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, the database giant announced its plans to launch Oracle Database@Google Cloud and Oracle Database@Azure services for their respective cloud platforms.
In another announcement today, the company said Oracle Database@Google Cloud, which was first unveiled in June, is now generally available in four of Google Cloud’s regions: US East (Ashburn, Virginia), US West (Salt Lake City, Utah) UK South (London) and Germany Central (Frankfurt).
With the launch, Google Cloud customers will be able to run Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure within Google Cloud’s data centers. The latter offering is a fully managed data protection service for Oracle Exadata Database Service.
In addition, Oracle said today, customers will be able to run their applications on Oracle Linux on Google Cloud, while benefiting from easy access to Google’s extensive AI development capabilities. It said the partnership will bring “enterprise truth” to data and enable faster insights by running two clouds as one while maintaining feature parity with OCI.
International Data Corp. analyst Carl Olofson said one of the most exciting things for customers is they’ll be able to use data from Oracle with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform and its powerful Gemini large language models.
“Oracle and Google Cloud’s mutual customers are the ultimate winners in this multicloud strategy, as they benefit from the simplicity, security and low latency of a unified operating environment,” the analyst said.
Finally, Oracle said the Oracle Database@Azure service that was first announced last year is launching in six Azure cloud regions. It’s available to customers now through Azure’s Australia East, Canada Central, East US, France Central, Germany West Central and UK South regions, alongside the Oracle Exadata and Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery services.
In addition, Oracle said it’s planning to introduce new database replication and fully managed heterogenous data integration services to Database@Azure, which will ensure full feature parity with OCI GoldenGate and enable integrations with Microsoft Fabric and OneLake.