Oracle founder Larry Ellison makes first-ever trip to Microsoft headquarters for cloud announcement

Larry Ellison, the co-founder, chairman and chief expertise officer of Oracle, has been going up towards Microsoft to in database software program for greater than 30 years. He has additionally had to take care of purchasers wanting to join their Oracle and Microsoft merchandise. But till this week, he had by no means made the journey to Microsoft’s headquarters exterior Seattle.

He was on the town to seem alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to announce an enlargement of the collaboration between the 2 corporations. Oracle is putting its Exadata {hardware}, which accommodates servers for databases and storage, inside the info facilities that Microsoft makes use of to run its Azure public-cloud service for internet hosting functions.

Organizations will probably be ready to retailer knowledge with Oracle’s database software program through the use of Azure, quite than having to set up Oracle {hardware} in their very own knowledge facilities or use Oracle’s public cloud. Putting the Oracle tools in Azure knowledge facilities implies that functions will probably be ready to shortly entry knowledge from the databases.

“It was pretty to come up right here, stated Ellison in a virtual presentation on the announcement, which he teased on Oracle’s earnings call with analysts on Monday. “It’s truly my first time in Redmond. It’s laborious to consider. I waited until very late in my profession to make this trip.”

Nadella conveyed the importance of Microsoft and Oracle working collectively by mentioning a reminiscence from his early years, earlier than he managed groups constructing Azure, the Bing search engine and Dynamics gross sales software program. He joined Microsoft from Sun Microsystems in 1992, taking a place as a program manager within the Windows developer relations group.

“When I first got here to Microsoft, the primary week, they requested me to type of get ISVs onto Windows NT at the moment,” Nadella stated. “I stated, ‘There’s no means we will get ISVs onto Windows NT first with out getting Oracle onto Windows NT.'”

Nadella stated the brand new collaboration would possibly assist corporations extra shortly transfer their workloads from their present knowledge facilities to the general public cloud.

The two corporations have not utterly given up their rivalry, although. Oracle and Microsoft will nonetheless compete to promote cloud-based infrastructure, however Azure is bigger and extra mature, and Oracle needs to have clients maintain utilizing its merchandise at the same time as they undertake different clouds. And there’s nothing stopping longtime Oracle clients from contemplating Microsoft’s databases in Azure.

The rigidity between the 2 corporations reached a excessive level in 2000, as Microsoft was in the course of its hallmark antitrust case towards the U.S. Justice Department. Oracle told media outlets that it had employed a detective agency that attempted to purchase trash from a Microsoft-backed commerce group by providing cash to janitors working on the group’s workplace in Washington.

Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and is the world’s fifth richest particular person on the planet, whereas Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, ranks fourth, in accordance to Bloomberg. But Ellison controls 42% of Oracle’s excellent shares, whereas Gates owns simply over 1% of Microsoft inventory, in accordance to FactSet.

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