Bitter Cloud Competition is turning Rivals into Allies
Recently, Oracle Corp and Microsoft Corp made a splash in cloud integration with the announcement of interoperability of their clouds at Inspire, an online event for Microsoft partners. The availability of Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure will allow Azure users to access and monitor the Oracle database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With the introduction of the duo’s multi-cloud database service, it just got easier to stick together the databases in OCI with workloads running in Microsoft Azure. In addition, the users can migrate or build new applications on Azure and tap into the high performance and availability guaranteed by Oracle. Why partner with a competitor? “Microsoft and Oracle have a history of working together to support the needs of our joint customers. This partnership is an example of how we offer customer choice and flexibility as they digitally transform with cloud technology,” said Corey Sanders, corporate VP of Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion, in a statement. The companies said that enterprises could seamlessly connect Azure services, like Analytics and AI, to Oracle Cloud services, like autonomous databases. The partnership has attracted high-profile customers, including AT&T, Veritas, Marriott International, Swiss and SGS. The new service connects Oracle’s database service directly to the Azure cloud, eliminating previously required custom work. Oracle and Microsoft have won and protected market share for decades by competing at each technology tier and integrating competing technologies. On Microsoft’s side, this partnership shows a willingness to collaborate with any market leaders and to make it easier for Microsoft clients to work with their client of choice. Previously, Microsoft Azure partnered with IBM to offer enterprise security solutions. So, Microsoft is not alone in Google and AWS partnerships. Earlier in May 2022, AWS’ collaboration with IBM allowed joint customers to make various IBM software available on AWS Marketplace. Adding to the partnerships, in 2020, Google joined with IBM to catch their larger cloud services competitors and offer their customers the best of both clouds. Towards consolidation Companies are spending a fortune on the cloud, but the market is shrinking, and names like AWS, Azure, and GCP are capturing the lion’s share of it. Companies building a cloud strategy need to factor cloud computing trends into their plans and prepare to survive major shifts due to the failure, acquisition or discontinuation of a cloud provider that they rely on. Mordor Intelligence predicted a 21% compound annual growth rate for hybrid cloud through 2026. IBM called it a $1 trillion market with plenty of opportunity for channel partners to cash in. As per Microsoft’s Q4 FY2022 Earnings Report, investors will focus on revenue growth in Azure and other cloud services. However, Microsoft still has to compete with Amazon, Alphabet Inc.’s Google cloud and other competitors. The cloud computing market is growing, and Azure is growing faster than Microsoft as a whole. However, Microsoft still has to compete with Amazon, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, and other smaller rivals. This holds significance especially since work-from-home and hybrid work arrangements that began during the pandemic may be here to stay, boosting the market for cloud services.
The success of an alliance depends on both partners benefitting from the existing market or from gaps in the market that competitors are yet to spot.
Recently, Oracle Corp and Microsoft Corp made a splash in cloud integration with the announcement of interoperability of their clouds at Inspire, an online event for Microsoft partner.
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["Go", "GCP", "AWS", "cloud computing", "AI", "R", "ML", "Git", "analytics", "Azure"]
["AI", "ML", "analytics", "cloud computing", "AWS", "Azure", "GCP", "R", "Go", "Git"]
Tasmia is a tech journalist at AIM, looking to bring a fresh perspective to emerging technologies and trends in data science, analytics, and artificial intelligence.