Heavyweight notorious for aggressive licensing practices hooks its cloud up to Oracle's Microsoft got together with Oracle today to fling interoperability at users of Azure and the latter's less-loved Cloud. The trading relationship is aimed at running workloads over both services. The dream has the likes of Analytics and AI in Azure connected to Oracle's Autonomous Database, plugging the gaps in each vendor's …
So Oracle have looked at their cloud business and realised that if they don't move customers to one of the main providers in the next 3 years, the custoemrs will move themselves and ditch Oracle services where possible. Everything Oracle initially pretended wasn't important in cloud hosting (latency, scale, innovation and investment - there's probably more) turned out to be pretty important after all in spite of what Larry said.
This is about Oracle shuttering it's cloud business and becoming a tenant of one of the big providers because they couldn't afford to compete. Azure seems that most natural fit for them, with AWS being a non-starter and Google not really providing an IaaS (in my opinion...) that Oracle can lift and shift customers too.
Next will be IBM and who might they choose? Although the major issue the majority of IBM's customers will have is discovering that the only thing "cloud" about their IBM services is the contract indicating that their service may be recognised as cloud revenue and they're still stuck in the 90's hosting model that they signed up for. But you signed up for a 2000's hosting model? Possibly, but then you outsourced your IT to IBM and they moved all your hosting back to a model they were more comfortable with.
Unlikely - it would throw up to many regulatory issues around market share in database (~67%+ market share)/enterprise solutions and the potential for predatory pricing. OK, even more predatory pricing where they move from an arm and a leg to three or more limbs and a significant portion of the body. Tripled for RAC naturally...
From Microsoft's perspective, Oracle solutions running on Azure gives them a share of Oracle's revenue with little effort. And is spending a lot of money on Oracle (market cap is around US$176bn) justified by the returns? Oracle has ~US$38bn revenue resulting in ~US$30bn profit so I would expect a significant premium despite predicted future revenue declines due to a shrinking enterprise DB market. My guesstimate is a purchase price in the order of US$300-400bn.
Plus, where would Larry fit in?
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