Oracle and Microsoft announced they're pairing each of their respective strengths in database and cloud technology together to help joint customers improve reliability, security and performance of data-driven applications like artificial intelligence (AI).

With the new Oracle Database at Azure offering, the two vendors are physically placing Oracle database hardware and software used in Oracle Cloud in Microsoft Azure data centers. “When a customer uses Microsoft technology connected to Oracle technology, they'll get best-in-class performance,” Oracle CTO Larry Ellison said.

AI can't be successful without data, and having Oracle's database technology located in Azure allows enterprises to take Azure OpenAI models right to where the data is hosted and fine-tune, pretrain or prompt a model with low latency.

“This is the moment where data and AI are coming together to transform businesses and business processes. There couldn't be a more profound timing of these two things,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.

Ellison said customers are “very excited” about this partnership and “pleased” that Microsoft and Oracle, often viewed as competitors, are cooperating to benefit customers and improve both the convenience and cost efficiency of using AI.

Training an Azure OpenAI model, for example, requires moving significant amounts of data that's likely stored in an Oracle database. Colocating the model and the data, however, “gets that done in the most efficient way possible, where the data and AI model are very close to each other,” Ellison said.

“This will fundamentally accelerate the migration to the cloud, and get not only the movement to the cloud, but get them to do new things,” Nadella added. “In order to use AI, you have to have data, and that data is in an Oracle database.” The new service hopes to provide “the best of both worlds to evolve business processes.”

Specifically, users can go to their Azure portal and provision an Oracle autonomous database on an Exadata server before marrying that to OpenAI technology – or any of the tech in Microsoft's Azure library. “It's all now one multicloud system,” Ellison said.