‘Many of our long-time rivals are now our partners’: Why Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud

Oracle has announced a new partnership with AWS at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, forming part of the firm's wider mission to bolster multi-cloud environments across the enterprise.

The new offering will allow customers to use Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS environments, providing a connected experience across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AWS.

Similarly, customers will be able to plug data from their Oracle environments into applications running on specific AWS services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon Bedrock.

Oracle’s rallying cry around this announcement has been one of ‘cloud unity’, with other announcements from the firm falling into a similar vein of multi-cloud adoption for its customers.

For example, it also announced the general availability of Oracle Database@Google Cloud in four regions across the US and Europe. This will allow customers to run various Oracle services on OCI in Google Cloud datacenters.

“Many of our long time rivals are now our partners … Microsoft, then Google and now AWS,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said at her opening keynote for the flagship event in Las Vegas.

“We build our technology so that you - our customers - can run it anywhere you want,” she added, doubling down on the general theme of openness which was a constant throughout the first day keynotes.

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison championed a similar message in his keynote speech later in the day, lamenting the fact that many clouds “really don’t work well together” in the current enterprise landscape.

Ellison noted many customers desired interoperability between AWS and Oracle.

Given this seemed “such a good idea,” Oracle moved to establish the partnership, and Ellison went on to formally announce the agreement later in his talk with AWS CEO Matt Garman on stage.

Oracle is building on a sense of interoperability that it’s been working on for some time with these announcements. The Oracle Database@Azure service received a huge update earlier this year, for example, bringing connectivity with Microsoft’s cloud platform to a further five regions globally.

Oracle eyes a practical approach to multi-cloud

While this latest partnership with AWS is largely a continuation of Oracle’s “existing multi-cloud efforts”, according to Gartner analyst Sid Nag, it’s still important to commend the firm on its move towards multi-cloud.

“Any cloud provider that is sort of raising their hand and saying, ‘I'm committed to multi cloud’, and actually doing something about it, gives them … the position of being a thought leader, so I think it’s good,” Nag told ITPro on the ground at CloudWorld.

He also noted the importance of Oracle’s practical approach to multi-cloud.

This approach is, in Nag’s words, a “desired architectural model … I have complex workloads and applications for which my primary cloud provider cannot provide all the capabilities and services, so I lean into a secondary or third tertiary cloud provider.”

This is the desired intent of multi-cloud, Nag added, but the difficult part is the instrumentation of that process. Nag referred to this as “cross-cloud integration framework” - a term used by Gartner and one which accurately describes what Oracle is doing.

“What they're actually doing is not only committing themselves to the multi cloud capability, but it's actually making it real by implementing a cross cloud integration framework,” Nag said.

Oracle’s move towards multi-cloud positions it well in the wider tech landscape, with many providers and end-users increasingly turning to this approach to deliver cost benefits, increased flexibility, and security.