Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure is expected to be announced today at Microsoft Inspire, an online event for Microsoft partners.

It builds on an integration introduced in 2019 known as Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure. This previous step connected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. It took a lot of effort and technical expertise from customers to make it work, the companies said.

“Over the past two years we have had great success with this. And we also received a lot of feedback from customers. And one of the things customers (said) was, “Hey, it’s great that you two work together, but we would really like a more integrated experience,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud. Infrastructure.

“The ability to leverage both clouds and flexibility is a real boon for customers,” said Corey Sanders, vice president of Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion.

The new service connects Oracle’s database service directly to the Azure cloud, eliminating the custom work that would have been required previously.

In practice, this means an Oracle database user can easily move data to the Microsoft Azure cloud and gain access to Microsoft tools such as Azure Synapse, which analyzes the data, the companies said.

There are no fees associated with data transfer between the two cloud platforms, although customers pay for other services beyond data transfer, such as Azure Synapse or Autonomous Database Auto-tuning and patching Oracle.

The new service includes a dashboard with a single sign-on process. This means Oracle customers moving workloads to Azure can still work in an Oracle-like environment and vice versa, reducing the need for customers to learn new systems.

Oracle and Microsoft interconnects are in 11 facilities in the Americas, Europe and Asia. This physical proximity enables a level of communication latency or delay of less than 2 milliseconds on cloud platforms, the companies said.

Oracle and Microsoft made the service available early on to a number of companies, including Veritas Technologies LLC, a multicloud data management company based in Santa Clara, California.

“The experience has been very good. Many enterprise customers use Oracle and Microsoft and moving workloads… without this kind of integration would take a lot of effort,” said Jane Zhu, senior vice president of enterprise operations at Veritas.

“Oracle and Microsoft are absolutely unique in the way they fit together right now,” said Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Inc.

“I think we’re going to start seeing other cloud providers doing the same thing,” he said.

Amazon.co.uk Inc.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Alphabet Inc.

Google Cloud accounted for 65% of the $53 billion in global spending on cloud services in the first quarter of the year, up from 52% of global sales four years ago, according to Synergy Research Group.

Oracle, based in Austin, Texas, said in June that the company’s revenue rose 5% to $11.84 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter, while total cloud revenue rose. 19% over the previous year to $2.9 billion.

Write to Steven Rosenbush at [email protected]