Say goodbye to walled gardens, Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud

Oracle is still focused heavily on driving multi-cloud adoption, doubling down on a message that came out of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas a few months ago.

As part of Oracle CloudWorld Tour London 2025, the firm announced an expansion of its multi-cloud relationship with Azure, which includes the availability of ‘Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure on Oracle Database@Azure.’

This expansion will remove the need to provision dedicated database and storage servers, giving customers greater access to the benefits of Oracle Exadata Database Service.

Speaking at the event, Rajagopal Subramaniyan, SVP of OCI networking, covered some of the firm’s broader, strategic commitments to the multi-cloud landscape.

“Until now, the industry has lacked a deliberate multi-cloud solution. This has increased customers' complexity when it comes to moving data - the operational complexity and cost is extremely troublesome for customers,” Subramaniyan said.

“Today, we are giving you the ability, the flexibility to keep your existing cloud infrastructure investments while leveraging Oracle's Database Cloud Services natively to run your operation workloads,” he added.

He asked the audience to think of this as a transition from a ‘walled garden’ approach to a ‘network of clouds’ approach that allows for more flexibility.

“Multi-cloud is the connective tissue that unites your existing clouds into one,” Subramaniyan said.

“You can maximize the value of each of your cloud investments, enabling them to come together. A multi-cloud eliminates the reliance on a single cloud provider. This means you have the flexibility now to run your workloads with the hyperscalers of your choice,” he added.

Jason Rees, SVP of technology and cloud infrastructure for Oracle EMEA, echoed a similar sentiment when speaking at a press briefing during the event, noting that the tech giant is intent on breaking down barriers for customers.

“Oracle has really led the way on this concept of choice, of multi-cloud, and what we recognized was the need for, rather than the industry creating walled gardens, we wanted to better break those down to make it easier,” Rees said.

Oracle is all in on multi-cloud

Multi-cloud partnerships were the rallying cry of the firm’s last big event in the US, with CTO Larry Ellison calling it “the beginning of the multi-cloud era” and talking up the firm’s mission of giving customers choice.

A key factor in this sharpened focus on multi-cloud lies in the benefits of this approach amidst the generative AI boom. Fostering closer collaborative ties with major industry counterparts will ultimately drive adoption of the technology and deliver benefits for enterprise customers.

“You – our customers – are what brings this all together for us,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, driving home the customer-centric aim.

The event’s biggest announcement was a new tie-up with AWS that allows customers to use Oracle’s database services in AWS environments and plug data from Oracle environments into AWS applications.

“Many of our long time rivals are now our partners … Microsoft, then Google, and now AWS,” Catz said.

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