Oracle expanded its partnership with fellow cloud giant Microsoft to allow customers to use cloud services from both providers in their latest multicloud managed services push.

“We fundamentally believe – and Microsoft, as well – that multicloud is a real thing and that customers really want to be able to use technologies from different providers together,” Leo Leung, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) VP of product management, told SDxCentral in an interview.

When on-premises was the standard, companies could buy software from Microsoft and software from Oracle, install both on the same server, and it worked just fine. But in the age of the cloud, each provider “tends to have their own services. And in general, the providers have not spent a lot of time trying to integrate across clouds,” Leung explained.

Until now, he said, adding that this type of cloud integration “hasn't really been a focus of the providers aside from Microsoft and Oracle.”

Leung has seen more than 300 production customers relying on that network interconnection since the two providers began collaborating to connect their clouds in 2019.

“They started to take advantage of the benefits of being able to, for example, run analytics on Azure and databases on Oracle Cloud infrastructure and be able to use them together as if they were a single cloud,” Leung explained.

But this presented a challenge due to the customer-managed nature of those multicloud capabilities. Oracle provided services to the customer, but it was up to the customer to establish the interconnection between clouds and take care of network peering, identity federation, etc. “There was work associated with it, so there were some limitations,” Leung said.

Oracle Database service for Microsoft Azure removes some of that responsibility from the customer. Leung describes it as a managed service that sits atop the two providers' previous network interconnection, which “makes it much, much easier and seamless for Azure customers in particular” to use Oracle's database tools.

According to the company, setup takes three steps: “You connect the identities, you connect the clouds, you then are taken to a user experience,” Leung said. “It's an Azure-like experience where you can provision your Oracle databases behind the covers. We're doing all the work to get those databases connected to Azure. And then you can start using those databases, just like you would use other Azure resources.”

“There's a lot of engineering that's gone on behind the scenes to make that experience very simple so that it's just a single pane of glass,” Leung added.

Leung said much of this multicloud work has been driven by customer demand, leading Oracle to explore how two cloud providers can work together to make it easier for customers to use different technologies together.

But it's also been driven by what Leung sees as the next phase of the cloud, referencing the market's current level of maturity. “We think there's going to be an evolution now where the customers will demand that the providers need to work together [so] that they can get the best of what they want from the cloud provider of choice and be able to mix those resources together just like, again, they used to be able to,” Leung said.

Oracle Database VP of Software Development Kris Rice added that he's seen firsthand how complicated multicloud can be. “A lot of customers have to hand roll it, and they kind of stop and declare victory when the two networks talk together,” Rice said.

But the bigger multicloud picture is about one part of a workload running in one cloud and another part of that workload running in another cloud. “It's about making it more obvious and easy so that you can monitor the entire stack across the two different clouds,” Rice explained.