The vast amount of data in today’s enterprises provides a great opportunity to get valuable insights that enhance an organization’s products, goods and services. At the same time, many companies are migrating to the cloud to take advantage of its flexibility, efficiency and scale.

With the recent advances in generative AI, businesses face new urgency to bring cloud services like analytics and machine learning to one of their most valuable technology environments: data. According to Gartner, the database market grew 14.4% this year and is on course to be a more than $100 billion market by the end of 2023. The overwhelming contributor to that growth is cloud database as a service.

For customers moving their critical data environments from within the walls of their business to the cloud, one key consideration is the ability to seamlessly connect data sources to new and massive scale cloud services like Azure OpenAI and Azure Kubernetes Service. That’s why we are expanding our partnership with Oracle, enabling Oracle’s 430,000 customers[i] to apply the unique services of the Microsoft cloud to Oracle’s mission-critical databases. With this new offering, Azure is the only cloud provider other than Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to host Oracle services, including Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Azure datacenters.

Our deep partnership with Oracle continues to focus on reducing the common hurdles customers face when migrating workloads to the public cloud. Oracle Database@Azure is our new offering to bring Oracle Database services inside Azure. With the ability for customers to migrate Oracle databases “as is” to OCI and deploy them in Azure alongside their current workloads in the Microsoft Cloud, organizations can create new solutions and further competitive differentiation.

Customers across industries have expressed interest in the solution, including Fidelity, PepsiCo, Vodafone and Voya Financial.

Oracle Database@Azure opens new growth potential for the 97% of Fortune 100 companies who use Oracle databases.[i] From financial services to telecommunications and retail to transportation, businesses across every industry are eager to integrate mission-critical data from line of business apps with cloud services to realize higher efficiency, reduce customer churn and create new business applications. Oracle Database@Azure will improve the customer experience with higher availability, enhancing security and compliance on their transactions, improving logistics and supply chain management, and more.

To make this seamless, our engineering teams worked closely to colocate Oracle database services on OCI, such as Exadata and related OCI hardware, into Microsoft datacenters. The combination of Oracle Exadata hardware with OCI and Azure infrastructure means Oracle Database@Azure customers can migrate existing databases to OCI and deploy in Azure, enhance security by keeping apps and data on a single network, gain optimal performance with the same fully managed Exadata Database Service that runs in OCI, and then innovate with the comprehensive services offered in the Microsoft cloud. The tight integration also ensures that Azure customers can use existing skills to build and operate Oracle databases from within the Azure Portal and APIs.

Customers choose the Microsoft cloud for many reasons, including cutting-edge AI capabilities, multilayered security and ecosystem support with hundreds of products and thousands of partners. The high performance and availability of Oracle Exadata has been a critical component of enterprise operations for more than 15 years, running critical transaction processing, analytics, machine learning and mixed workloads. By bringing together the best of the Microsoft cloud and Oracle technology, Oracle Database@Azure helps enterprises harness the power of data in the cloud.

At Microsoft, we believe customers should have the freedom and flexibility to choose the services, infrastructure and clouds that best serve their unique needs. With our passion for helping customers create new value in the cloud, today’s expanded partnership with Oracle marks a new chapter in meeting organizations’ evolving needs.