At a presentation on Microsoft's campus, Oracle co-founder and tech chief Larry Ellison and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an announcement about the extension of their partnership. Ellison stated that Microsoft's Azure cloud will have access to Oracle database services by means of Oracle hardware in their data centers. The two firms, which have been in competition for over thirty years, are now formally collaborating.
For more than three decades, Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, chairman, and chief technology officer, has been competing with Microsoft in the realm of database software. Additionally, he has had to address clients looking to link Oracle and Microsoft products. Until this week, however, he had never gone to Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle. He went there in order to join Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in announcing a broadening of the alliance between the companies. Oracle is conducting its Exadata hardware, which carries servers for storage and databases, within the data centers employed by Microsoft to run its Azure public-cloud platform. Consumers ought to be able to store info on Oracle's database software by using Azure, instead of having to deploy Oracle hardware on their own premises or rely on Oracle's public cloud. The presence of Oracle's gear in Microsoft's data centers means that applications will be capable of rapidly retrieving data from the databases.During a virtual presentation on the announcement, which he mentioned during Oracle's earnings call with analysts on Monday, Ellison said, "It was lovely to come up here. It is actually my first time in Redmond. It's hard to believe. I waited until very late in my career to make this journey." Nadella recalled a recollection from his early years, when he did not supervise teams working on Azure, the Bing search engine, and Dynamics software. In 1992, he left Sun Microsystems to join Microsoft in the role of a program manager in the Windows developer relations team. "When I first got to Microsoft, my first week there, they asked me to get ISVs onto Windows NT at that time," he said. "I said, 'There's no way we can get ISVs onto Windows NT first without getting Oracle onto Windows NT.'" Nadella remarked that the new joint venture might help companies move their operations from existing data centers to the public cloud quickly.Though Oracle and Microsoft still vie to sell cloud-based frameworks, Azure is both more extensive and more sophisticated, so Oracle wants customers to continue using its products even if they are using other clouds. Oracle's long-term customers may still consider Microsoft's databases on Azure, though.The contention between Microsoft and Oracle achieved its peak in 2000, when Microsoft was in the middle of its antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department. Oracle informed journalists that it had appointed a detective firm that tried to acquire trash from a Microsoft-backed trade organization by providing money to the janitors working in the organization's office in Washington. Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and is the world's fifth wealthiest person, while Gates, who established Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, ranks fourth, according to Bloomberg. Nevertheless, Ellison has control of 42% of Oracle's existing shares, and Gates just holds slightly over 1% of Microsoft's stock, according to FactSet.
Comments