How Enterprises Are Innovating with the Best of Oracle Database and Microsoft Azure

In a move that could reshape the cloud landscape, Microsoft and Oracle are forging an unlikely alliance to deliver a powerful solution.💪

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Six Five Media’s David Nicholson hosts a conversation between tech leaders Karan Batta, SVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Brett Tanzer, VP, Azure Product Management, Microsoft 

on how their partnership is making the seemingly impossible, possible: running Oracle databases, optimized on Exadata infrastructure, directly within Azure.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Deepening Collaboration: Microsoft and Oracle have significantly expanded their partnership, bringing Oracle database to Azure with Exadata infrastructure.

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🔹The Best of Both Worlds for Customers: This integration provides customers with the performance and optimization of Oracle database solutions combined with the breadth and reach of Azure services.

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🔹Expanded Global Availability: Oracle database on Azure is rapidly expanding its global footprint, making it a viable option for enterprises worldwide.

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🔹Customer-Driven Solution: The partnership addresses the demand from customers who want to run their Oracle workloads in Azure alongside their other Azure applications.

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Learn more about Oracle Database@Azure.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

David Nicholson: Welcome. I'm Dave Nicholson with The Futurum Group here for Six Five Media and we've got a really interesting conversation on the line. If you go back in history, these two companies have been rivals and partners at the same time. This is a classic example of what we call co-opetition in the tech space. I'm joined by Brett Tanzer from Microsoft, the Azure Group, and Karan Bhatta from Oracle. Gentlemen, welcome.

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Brett Tanzar: Thanks for having me.

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David Nicholson: This is super interesting. For years and years there's been a bit of attention in the database space over the years between Oracle and Microsoft, naturally. How long ago was it, however, that you folks decided to come together and actually run Oracle on essentially Oracle hardware in Azure’s cloud? Brett, how long has that been going on for?

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Brett Tanzar: Well, you know, Microsoft and Oracle have been partnering in the cloud for about nine years. So we have a number of different solutions. It was just about two years ago when we launched the Oracle database at Azure and brought Exadata infrastructure into the Azure cloud.

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David Nicholson: And we've got something new to talk about. Let's jump straight to the latest. Karan, what's the latest on that front? Then we'll dig into some of the details about what Exadata and Exascale mean.

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Karan Batta: Sure, yeah. I think we are of course a database company, but also an infrastructure company. We're continually investing in our database services. I think the two main announcements I'd say is of course we have the region availability stuff we can talk about, but it's really Exadata service on Exascale infrastructure. This is our future of what Exadata is going to look like moving forward in the cloud, which is essentially disaggregated Exadata that you can scale, you know, as you need, essentially. And then the second thing being is not everybody needs an Exadata, right? But customers do need a broader database service. At OCI, we have the base database service that allows you to launch a database on everything from a subcore all the way up to Exadata. We now have that availability as part of Azure as well.

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David Nicholson: Okay, makes sense. Now, Brett, when people think about a cloud provider in general, we're often thinking about optimizing around standardized infrastructure that will support anything. But there are cases where specialized infrastructure makes a lot of sense. So where's the kind of specialized piece that comes into this from your perspective?

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Brett Tanzar: Well, you know, because Oracle has done such great work to optimize the database services on top of Exadata hardware, customers who run Oracle database services on Exadata and Azure, they really get the best of both worlds. They get all of the capabilities they've built to enable high availability and all the performance and optimizations around the storage stacks. This is a case where the vertical integration between the hardware and the database software really pays off for customers. And then once we deliver that in an Azure data center and connect it to our network and provide sub millisecond access to the rest of Azure, it creates a really powerful combination for application developers and AI developers who want to take that specialized hardware and database stack from Oracle and build applications that work with the rest of Azure.

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David Nicholson: Okay, so key there is that you're not just creating an island of Exa fill in the blank, but you're actually creating an environment that has connectivity into the rest of all of Azure's goodness. Is that what I just heard?

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Karan Batta: You know, I think that makes sense. I think the thing to understand here is that it's the same service that we offer to our public cloud customers as well. So essentially what we're doing because we do sell Exadata Cloud Customer, which is an independent hardware appliance as well. What Azure is getting essentially is the same level of performance, guarantees, operational cadence. Like all of the things that we do for our public cloud customers in OCI, we're essentially doing that inside Azure as a first party native thing. We operate it just like we would any other OCI region. So those are all the capabilities that come with.

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David Nicholson: Well, Brett touched a little bit on this idea of a vertically integrated stack of hardware. Can you double click on that? Because it all sounds good, but what does that mean exactly when you talk about Exascale, specifically Exadata. We know the Oracle database, but how is this vertically integrated?

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Karan Batta: Yeah, it comes from everything, from the hardware itself. We've obviously designed the hardware specifically for database workloads. There's the hypervisor and all of the management layer and the software that comes with the Exadata appliance. And then on top of that, it's all of the other features that are tightly integrated. For example, rack. Right. Where customers are able to deploy distributed database. Then there are things like Data Safe and GoldenGate which are tightly integrated into those pieces. So everything just works out of the box. Now part of this also is there's also this integration that happens with Azure. Right. So everything from identity to networking to the platform integration, where a customer needs to be able to manage, run and operate on Exadata just like they used to on premise, but it needs to work in the same operational capacity in the cloud and through Azure. So that means when you launch a database on a PDB or CDB, you essentially are able to get the same level of monitoring, logging, analytics, all those things just flow through automatically “automagically.” And, and that's because of all the integration that we've done directly into the platform layer of Azure.

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David Nicholson: Let's say I'm an administrator who has an Exadata system in my data center. It's on premises. We also have folks who are using Azure for all sorts of different services. What's this sort of acquisition path to this? Where do I go? What's the go to market? Is this something that can be had in essentially Microsoft Azure's store of services like this? Would you go through Oracle? How do we get that? Let me ask Brett that question.

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Brett Tanzar: Yeah, I mean, customers can get Oracle databases at Azure right through the Azure portal. You go into the Azure portal, sign in with your account and you see availability, and then you work with your partners at Oracle to make sure you've got all the pricing negotiated and uploaded to the portal. Then you just go through and you acquire it just like you would any other Azure service. What's great is that Oracle engineers have done the work to go integrate that experience into the Azure platform. The people who build it, they've done the work to give you an experience, to provision it and to figure out the right capacity and done all of that work right in the Azure portal.

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David Nicholson: Now, Brett, when we talk about cloud, one of the pitches is it's not on-prem, it's off prem, it's not here, it's there. And you shouldn't care where “there” is. But the reality is it does matter where these things physically reside. Have you made movements in terms of where these services are available? Because I imagine you don't have Exadata systems deployed in every single location around the globe that offer some measure of Azure. What does that look like today?

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Brett Tanzar: Well, not yet, anyway. Today we already have an Oracle database at Azure available in 14 of Azure's 60 plus regions. And we've committed to deliver another 17 by the end of the calendar year. So we should be halfway there by the end of this year.

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David Nicholson: Karan, are we still talking about this in terms of hybrid cloud? If you had to tell me the percentage of folks who are running some Oracle stuff on-prem, some Oracle stuff in Azure, is that going to be the majority or are people moving everything into Azure in this environment?

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Karan Batta: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I think the reality right now is that one of the reasons why we have this partnership in the first place is because customers have already picked a first provider. Right. We don't want to limit customers choices to be like well it's OCI or nothing or on-prem. We want to make sure that we are giving the customers a choice to get the same first class citizen experience, Oracle experience, doesn't matter what cloud they go to. So with Azure, right, they've picked Azure for certain reasons, whether it's AI capabilities, analytics, other parts of the platform with we want to make sure that Oracle stack works harmoniously with those pieces and then we want to give them like it's not a lever that it's like well if you run it in Azure it works worse than if you run it on-prem. Now there's a difference in the delta between on-prem and the cloud. Like of course if you want to run it behind, if you run it in a bunker, right? Like sure, like you can buy Exadata cloud customer appliances. It's not going to give you the scalability, the pay per use, all the things that you know, you talk about from a cloud perspective. But if you just want to run something on prem behind a wall and you just want to have that single deployment, we still have that option for customers but a lot of those customers are tending to move away from that model because we're almost covering pretty much every base.

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David Nicholson: Well, you mentioned the C word customers. Do you have any examples of use cases? Oftentimes it's tough to toss out names of companies and everyone is doing business with those companies. But, give me an example of a really good use case for this? Something that would be the driver where someone would say you know, I want to do this.

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Karan Batta: Sure, yeah. So I think Brett can also take this but essentially, the number one thing that we find is, you know, the world's data run Oracle databases. They're kind of deployed everywhere. They're ubiquitous in some ways. Right. So it's part of the reason for the region deployment strategy. But to start off, a customer runs an Oracle database they're running. You know, we're also an applications company, so we have hundreds of applications, everything from retail to finance to even, you know, healthcare as an example, or even the horizontal apps like the back office applications like E-business suite, PeopleSoft, those kinds of things. So a lot of customers are, you know, building cloud native solutions, let's say on Azure. They also want to bring together their back office applications running on Oracle database. And so they're able to now deploy certified back office applications directly on Azure backed by Oracle database service. So that's number one and that's the easiest path forward for our customer to move those, I don't want to say legacy, but legacy workloads into the cloud. But then on top of that, they also have satellite applications that sit around those backgrounds applications. There are custom applications running on WebLogic or Java or something else. They're also using this ability to move those applications in because most customers that are deploying Oracle apps generally have a complex set of back office and other types of custom apps that surround that. And so it's all got to just move in one. Sort of spooky, right? And then there's new age developers that are using things like autonomous databases and the Exascale service where these things are more competing with sort of the more cloud native like workloads where they're scaling massive cloud native workloads.

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Brett Tanzar: You asked about use cases, Dave. So we have customers in all vertical industries. We have customers in the financial services industry and banking that are using this to run their insurance practice and their customer databases, managing, you know, all of their customers or doing pricing on the back end. We have customers in the medical industry that are using it really to manage hospitals in the way that information is managed for various patients and partners and medical records in there. We have customers in the telecom industry that are using it really to deliver, you know, telecom and digital services all the way down to the edge. So because as Karan said, much of the world's data lives in Oracle. There's such a diversity of use cases that we're able to deliver in Azure now because we have an Oracle database in Azure.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, and I know you mentioned earlier that it's been nine years or more that you've been actively working as partners together, sometimes from the outside looking in. When you're looking at companies the size of Oracle or Microsoft, the perception from the customer can be, wow, is anyone listening to me? Obviously you're responding here to what customers are asking for, which is a huge impetus. But I'm going to ask you, Brett, what are some of the first things if someone says I want to run this platform within Azure, what are some of the first things that they end up dabbling in, Azure wise, that they maybe otherwise would not have been exposed to? Are there some specific things that you attach into that environment that are like top of the list?

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Brett Tanzar: Yeah, great question, Dave. So I think, you know, as a company that focuses a lot on delivering end to end enterprise workloads, there's a lot of services that really surround the data state that is Oracle database at Azure. You know, almost all of our customers come to Azure and after they migrate the database into the Azure cloud, one of the first things they do is they use Oracle GoldenGate to connect data into Microsoft fabric so they can go use analytics or they move data into OneLake so they can start to use our AI stack or they start to be able to build applications using our power tool automation suite because now that they've got their data in Azure connected by a very low latency network, they can build incredible applications and really take advantage of that set of capabilities.

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David Nicholson: Well, from the Oracle perspective, I have a question for you. Let's say I'm a customer and you and Microsoft and others have done your best to offer me pretty much anything I might want. Any combination. The great cartoon character Charlie Brown once said that often the most discouraging situation is having a lot of potential because you don't know what to do. How do people sort through this? How do people decide when to move, where to move? I mean, are they engaged with both the sort of the leading edge of Azure's go to market strategy and Oracle's go to market strategy? Do you jointly engage customers in the field? 

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Karan Batta: And there's multiple answers for it. I think it depends. But I think what I would say is in general the rule here is that we do collaborate on every single customer. Now, every single customer could be different. Right? Now the reality is their Oracle estate in some ways is “patternistic”. They're either running on-prem Exadata, they're running Oracle databases, a standalone thing on top of some other appliance or hardware and so actually migrating that to the cloud is not that hard. We already have “patternistic” behaviors and we have, you know, architecture to do that, whether it's, you know, going to OCI or going to Azure, whether it's refreshing or maybe moving parts of it to Azure. And you know, so I think we have different mechanisms to do that. The thing that really, I think what we've seen is customers love the fact that neither Azure nor Oracle cloud actually cares so much about, well, you should run this or that. We try to understand the customer's behavior and pattern and then we try to recommend what's best for them because at the end of the day the way the partnership is set up, we in fact end up gaining equally. It's a win-win situation because the customer gets what they want. They still stay in Oracle technology, they invest in Azure. In fact, even our field organizations are very well aligned in terms of incentives. And then on top of that we've made sure that there's no, I would say there's every motivation for the customer to do so. So for example, if a customer has a ULA contract with Oracle for licenses or database or whatever else today, if they move to OCI, we offer them support rewards. So if they use the cloud they get, you know, credit back on their support bill. We extend that offer if they move to Azure as well. So we try to do things in a way where it's independent. The decision, the commercial decision is independent of how they're actually going to move to the cloud. So and that's why the teams are so well aligned from an engineering field, even support perspective. You know, they, Microsoft takes level one and then we triage and we do it together. So it's, it's all of, it's kind of like very much in play with what the customers need and want and we try to give them the right path forward.

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Brett Tanzar: You know, like customers have really told us that this is a case where one plus one equals three, where they get the best of expertise from Oracle operating and with the best of expertise inside Azure and together and there's not a lot of friction between the organization. So that makes it really easy for them to get on board and start to migrate and figure out how to move their applications to the cloud and then start to modernize them.

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Karan Batta: Yeah, one thing I was going to mention was every customer that's a Microsoft 365 customer is also an Oracle customer. So one of the reasons why we started, in fact the Microsoft Oracle partnership started in a multi cloud way before anybody else. And the reason for that is customers are both of our customers and they're very complimentary in terms of the tech stacks. So it just makes sense. 

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David Nicholson: Yeah, yeah. Well, having been in some of the rooms, let's, let's be honest, there's also, there has also been tension over the years because we're all going after, we're all going after markets. That's why this is so remarkable, frankly. One more question, Brett. This might sound like a silly question, but if I want to essentially spin up an Exadata environment, do you have the hardware ready to do that?

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Brett Tanzar: I do.

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David Nicholson: In other words, if I said I want one of those in my data center, you're selling this as a service. If I want this and I can run it as a service in my own data center, I'm going to wait. There's that other thing where it's like this is a real cloud in the sense that you've already made the investment in the hardware. It's there, it's ready to go, and you're, you're now spinning up services. I have that right?

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Brett Tanzar: You, you have that right. Every day, Oracle engineers and Microsoft engineers work together to bring more capacity into Azure data centers around the globe. And so if you order it, we have it.

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Karan Batta: At the end of the day, we are in the business of selling computers. We have computers to sell.

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David Nicholson: It's amazing. It isn't often that I relish in the fact that I am so old, but I have to tell you, I know you guys have been doing this for a long time, but I've been around for a long time and this just still, it really feels special. It really does. So continued success to all parties concerned. For Six Five Media, I'm Dave Nicholson with The Futurum Group. Thanks for joining us in this conversation about running Oracle databases in Microsoft Azure. What a thing. Who knew?

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