Microsoft, Oracle Now Interconnect in Canada

Microsoft and Oracle expanded the friendly direct network interconnect link between their respective cloud platforms to the most friendly of places: Canada. Microsoft and Oracle expanded the friendly direct network interconnect link between their respective cloud platforms to the most friendly of places: Canada. The expansion will provide Canadian enterprise customers with the ability to connect their workloads between Microsoft’s Azure and Oracle’s Cloud and access that data as if it were in just a single location. The companies provided an example of an enterprise connecting Microsoft Azure services like analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to Oracle Cloud’s services like its Autonomous Database. This means those customers can run different parts of their workloads in those different cloud environments simultaneously. This interconnect provides for lower latency and support for a “broader spectrum of workloads” because it can use resources from both companies. Customers can access the interconnectivity through a unified, single sign-on, though both cloud providers will maintain their own customer maintenance and management contracts. Vinay Kumar, VP of product management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, noted in a blog post that 80% of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software. “As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier,” he added. The Canadian interconnect zone joins the initial locations announced in June: Oracle’s Ashburn, Virginia (North America) region and Microsoft Azure’s U.S. East and London (United Kingdom) locations. The vendors are targeting further expansion into the Western U.S., in a U.S. government specific region, into Asia, and into the European Union (EU). That original deal highlighted the divergent direction of both companies. Synergy Research Group found that Microsoft held about 20% of the public cloud services market at the end of the third quarter. That was about double its market share from early 2016, though it was about half of market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). Oracle was grouped into the anonymous “others” category alongside the likes of Salesforce, IBM, and Tencent, which combined had less than 30% of the market. Oracle does continue to have a significant influence in the enterprise space due to its embedded platforms tied to on-premises data centers. However, it’s struggling in the rapidly growing cloud space. Oracle this year alone was targeted for a significant reduction in use of its cloud services from SAP and Amazon. And its most recent quarter showed flat year-over-year cloud revenues, which is significant as that business is the biggest driver of the company’s overall revenues. Microsoft, on the other hand, has thrown considerable resources toward the cloud environment, which has been paying off for the computing giant. The company said that Azure revenues increased 59% during its most recent quarter. And it swiped the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract out from under AWS.