Oracle and Microsoft Extend Their Multi-Cloud Partnership to the UK

Oracle and Microsoft have expanded the direct cloud interconnect partnership they announced in June 2019, adding a private connection between their respective data centers in London to the original link established between two facilities in Virginia. The expansion means that joint customers in the United Kingdom can now run workloads across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure without routing traffic over the public internet.

The partnership is notable because it represents two major cloud vendors choosing interoperability over lock-in — a relatively unusual stance in an industry where each provider typically works to keep customers within its own ecosystem.

What the OCI–Azure Interconnect Actually Does

At a technical level, the interconnect is a dedicated, private network link between Oracle and Microsoft data centers in the same geographic region. Because traffic does not traverse the public internet, latency is significantly lower and throughput is more predictable than a standard internet-based integration would allow.

In practical terms, enterprises can connect Azure services to Oracle Cloud services and split application workloads between the two platforms. A commonly cited example is integrating Azure Machine Learning or other Microsoft analytics and AI services directly with Oracle’s Autonomous Database — each part of the workload running in the cloud best suited for it.

To reduce management overhead, the two companies also offer:

• Unified single sign-on (SSO): Users authenticate once and access resources in both clouds.
• Common identity and access management (IAM): Consistent identity controls across both platforms.
• Automated cross-cloud resource provisioning: Reducing the manual steps required to spin up connected infrastructure.

Why Geography Matters: Latency and the Speed of Light

A direct cloud interconnect is only practical when the participating data centers are physically close to each other. Leo Leung, then Senior Director of Products and Strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, explained the constraint plainly:

“It’s still all about the speed of light. We each have a cloud center there, so the latency is close to a millisecond, which works. You couldn’t do this if the servers were on the east and west coasts.”

— Leo Leung, Senior Director of Products and Strategy, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The Virginia interconnect benefited from Oracle and Microsoft already having data centers in close proximity in that region. London presented the same opportunity, which is why it became the second region for the interconnect. Vinay Kumar, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Management for OCI, noted in an August 28, 2019 blog post that London is one of Oracle Cloud’s most active regions worldwide — making it a logical choice for the expansion.

The Strategic Rationale: Customer Overlap and Market Pressure

The partnership was not simply a technical exercise. Industry analysts pointed to two converging pressures that drove it.

High Customer Overlap Between Oracle and Microsoft

Many large enterprises run Oracle databases and middleware alongside Microsoft productivity, analytics, and platform services. Leung acknowledged this directly:

“The overlap with our customers is very high, and that’s not the case with any other vendor. We want to give those customers options in the cloud with as little pain as possible.”

— Leo Leung, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

By making the interconnect feel transparent — “so it feels like one” to users, in Leung’s words — Oracle and Microsoft aimed to lower the friction of multi-cloud adoption for their shared customer base.

OCI’s Position in the IaaS Market

Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, offered a candid assessment of what also motivated the deal from Oracle’s side:

“Oracle was hoping to dominate in the cloud, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Companies are using more than one cloud provider, and the market has evolved.”

— Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principal Analyst, Lopez Research

At the time of this announcement, OCI trailed AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform in overall IaaS market share. Partnering with Microsoft gave Oracle a way to remain relevant in enterprise cloud conversations even where customers were already committed to Azure as their primary platform.

Charles King, President and Principal Analyst at Pund-IT Inc., noted that the arrangement also served Microsoft’s interests — specifically, its goal of deepening Azure’s presence in enterprise data centers:

“The arrangement should be particularly helpful to Oracle’s global clients since the company’s cloud offerings and services are nowhere near as varied, mature and widely available as Microsoft Azure. [But] the integration with Oracle’s database software should help ingrain Azure more deeply into the enterprise data centers that Microsoft covets.”

— Charles King, President and Principal Analyst, Pund-IT Inc.

Breaking Down Cloud Silos

Leung framed the interconnect as an antidote to one of cloud computing’s less-discussed problems — the proliferation of isolated, proprietary environments that can actually make it harder to modernize legacy infrastructure:

“This is what people are used to in the on-prem world — a lot of mixed vendors or overlap in the data center. The funny thing about the cloud is that in many ways it’s created more islands. There’s a lot of proprietary technology that is exclusive to one cloud vendor.”

— Leo Leung, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

By enabling a direct, low-latency bridge between OCI and Azure, Oracle and Microsoft argued that customers could accelerate migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud — because the multi-cloud environment they would move into would feel more familiar than a single-vendor cloud silo.

Will Other Cloud Providers Join?

At the time of the announcement, Oracle was explicit that the partnership was specific to Microsoft and was not a signal of broader multi-cloud interconnects with AWS or Google Cloud. The strong customer overlap between Oracle and Microsoft was cited as the primary reason for the exclusivity of the arrangement.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Engineers

• Private interconnects reduce latency: Sub-millisecond round-trip times between co-located OCI and Azure data centers make cross-cloud service calls viable for latency-sensitive workloads.
• Identity federation simplifies operations: Unified SSO and shared IAM reduce the operational overhead of managing identities across two cloud control planes.
• Workload placement becomes a design decision: Teams can route compute-intensive tasks to Azure while keeping Oracle-specific database workloads on OCI, without building complex network bridges themselves.
• Geography constrains your options: The interconnect was initially available only in Virginia and London regions — teams with workloads in other regions needed to factor in whether a supported region was available to them.
• Multi-cloud does not mean vendor-agnostic: This partnership is Oracle-Microsoft specific. Applications designed around this interconnect are not portable to an equivalent AWS or Google Cloud arrangement.