Microsoft and Oracle have announced a partnership that will see them offer a combined service for customers wanting to migrate their workloads to the cloud.

The combined services will allow users of Oracle’s autonomous databases to connect with Microsoft services such as Azure analytics and AI. Users will be able to log on to services from either firm with a single joint user name.

According to Oracle, the majority of the worlds largest enterprises use its databases along with Microsoft services, running them side-by-side in their on-premises data centres. But migrating these workloads to the cloud can often leave them stranded on multiple cloud islands, with little ability to share data between the two.

With this alliance, both companies are aiming to give customers the ability to seamlessly use multiple clouds with much greater effectiveness. It promises nimble apps that can shift from cloud to cloud easily that can even deploy individual apps that span multiple clouds.

«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,» said Scott Guthrie, head of Microsoft’s cloud unit.

Oracle’s vision for the partnerships is that customers can run applications in separate clouds with consistent controls and that these applications span clouds, typically with the database layer in one cloud and the app and web tiers in another. This is a low-latency connection between the clouds that lets customers choose preferred components for each application.

«Oracle is tremendously excited to give our customers the ability to leverage our technology alongside that of another industry leader with dramatically reduced friction,» said Vinay Kumar, VP of product management at Oracle.

«We see this as a first step down the path of greater choice, flexibility, and effectiveness for enterprise cloud usage. We’re eager to see what our customers will build with this new capability and where this alliance will take us and the industry.»

Currently, that industry is dominated by AWS, which has started a process of moving away from using Oracle databases. Back in August 2018, it was reported that this transition could take up to two years.