Azure Customers Will Have More Deployment Options With Microsoft-Oracle Alliance

Rivals turned partners, Microsoft and Oracle have recently announced an alliance which states that all of Oracles key offerings will be supported on Microsoft’s cloud-based platforms.

The two industry leaders have competed for decades to sell technology to the world’s largest companies. But they face growing pressure from new rivals selling often-cheaper services based in remote datacentres, and they are rushing to adapt.

Holger Mueller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research commenting on the alliance, said, “Microsoft jumps over its shadow and brings in a formerly competitive technology stack as a partner. It will give Azure customers more deployment options, but will also allow Microsoft to use the Oracle tech stack. We would not be surprised if Dynamics apps will run Oracle under the hood in the near future. Oracle is true to its technology partner DNA from early RDBMS days. And Oracle is good at supporting partners – which the track record of SAP running on Oracle proves.”

He also added, “This is a good announcement for both companies as it gives Azure more capabilities and Oracle more exposure to different hypervisors with the support of Hyper-V. But it’s a sensitive fault line in architecture and we will have to see how well applications build for the pure Microsoft Azure stack will run on the half red and half blue stack.”

However, Mueller also spelt out a note of caution. “It looks like Microsoft has reached the end of the road with the scalability of MS SQL Server. And while the partnership is formally all over adding capabilities to Azure – it really addresses scalability, performance and high TCO concerns for Microsoft. But mixing a technology stack is not an easy operation and the questions is why would a high performance seeking cloud prospective customer look at Azure in the first place – if they could go to Oracle anyway. And here lies the double edge nature of this – as it may make Hyper-V compatible applications run on the Oracle cloud stack - right away,” he concluded.