In a rather unusual arrangement, two Cloud rivals Microsoft and Oracle have announced an interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Enterprises can now seamlessly connect Microsoft Azure services, like Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to Oracle Cloud services, like Autonomous Database.

The move is seen as an effort by Oracle to offset losses in the fierce competition coming its way from Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.

AWS has offloaded Oracle as its Cloud vendor and would soon be 100 per cent reliable without the need of hosting Amazon workloads on Oracle Cloud.

Don Johnson, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) said that Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades.

"With this partnership, 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," he said in a statement late Wednesday.

Taken together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

"As the cloud of choice for the enterprise, with over 95 per cent of the Fortune 500 using Azure, we have always been first and foremost focused on helping our customers thrive on their digital transformation journeys," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Cloud and AI division.

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"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," he added.

Connecting Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly allows customers to extend their on-premises data centres to both clouds.

This direct interconnect is available starting today in Ashburn (North America) and Azure US East, with plans to expand additional regions in the future, the companies announced. (IANS)