Microsoft and Oracle announced a glorious alliance that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and “data seamlessly between the two”. After all, it is a pain when your data has seams.

This is rather odd as both companies are rivals and while Microsoft has been doing rather well in this space, Oracle has been a wanna be.

For Oracle, this alliance means that its users can run services like the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle JD Edwards on Azure while still using an Oracle database in the Oracle cloud, for example. In other words, Microsoft still gets to run the workloads and Oracle gets to do what it does best, though Azure users will also continue be able to run their Oracle databases in the Azure cloud, too.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executive vice president Don Johnson said that Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for sales, service, marketing, human resources, finance, supply chain and manufacturing, plus highly automated and secure Generation 2 infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database.

“Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades. With this alliance, our joint customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the cloud without having to re-architect anything, preserving the large investments they have already made.”

For now, the direct interconnect between the two clouds is limited to Azure US East and Oracle’s Ashburn data centre. The two companies plan to expand this alliance to other regions in the future, though they remain mum on the details. It’ll support applications like JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail and Hyperion on Azure, in combination with Oracle databases like RAC, Exadata and the Oracle Autonomous Database running in the Oracle Cloud.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division said that as the cloud of choice for the enterprise, with over 95 per cent of the Fortune 500 using Azure, it had always been first and foremost focused on helping its customers thrive on their "digital transformation journeys".

“With Oracle’s enterprise expertise, this alliance is a natural choice for us as we help our joint customers accelerate the migration of enterprise applications and databases to the public cloud.”

Vole has been carrying out some rather strange alliances lately, including its open data alliance with SAP and Adobe and a gaming partnership with Sony.