Oracle and Microsoft have expanded their multicloud alliance to the UK, following the launch of the partnership in June.
Users of both companies' clouds will be able to interconnect IT environments and applications that span both clouds. Vinay Shivagange Chandrashekar, vice president of product management at Oracle, said that linking cloud regions that are physically close to each other makes the interconnection more useful.
"Closer cloud resources means less latency, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds, and supports a broader spectrum of workloads using resources on both sides. By enabling this interconnection in London, we're opening the door for usage of this kind on a whole new continent," he said, adding that London is "one of the most active Oracle Cloud regions".
"By enabling a preconfigured, dedicated interconnection, common controls, integrated identity management, and support capabilities, we're giving customers a roster of new services in Azure that they can use with the services that they use in our cloud," he said.
He added that many customers that run in the UK can now deploy Oracle databases and applications as cloud services, and connect those services to applications on Azure that run the Microsoft stack. Joint customers can create a combination of services from each cloud, matching each part of their workload inventory to the optimal cloud for each, without added complexity or settling for an inferior environment for parts of what they run.
Chandrashekar said that before the cloud Oracle and Microsoft technologies could coexist effectively in customer data centres, with systems running each stack close enough for easy information exchange.
"The move to cloud broke this capability. Each vendor's cloud was isolated from the others, making interchange between solutions on each difficult or impossible," he said. "This alliance gives customers the ability to interconnect workloads from multiple vendors as they could in their own data centres."
Chandrashekar added that more multivendor solutions will be enabled by decoupled application architectures, common management frameworks, and better interconnection of networks.
