(Pictured above: Attendees pack the room for keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld.)

ORACLE OPENWORLD — Oracle is moving to make cloud computing easier for customers who want to run Oracle products alongside applications from other vendors including VMware and Microsoft.

In announcements here at the annual Oracle OpenWorld 2019 conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled an expanded partnership with VMware that enables customers to get support from Oracle for Oracle applications running in VMware environments, as well as a cloud partnership with Microsoft that provides an integration between Oracle Digital Assistant and Microsoft Teams.

Both moves are designed to make it easier for Oracle cloud infrastructure customers to use its products with applications and services from other vendors as customers move their workloads to the cloud.

In the VMware deal, customers will be able to run VMware cloud foundation on Oracle cloud infrastructure, making it easier for them to migrate VMware vSphere workloads to Oracle’s generation 2 cloud infrastructure. Under the partnership, Oracle will provide technical support for Oracle software running in VMware environments both in customer on-premises data centers and Oracle-certified cloud environments. Oracle will now become a partner in the VMware cloud provider program and Oracle cloud VMware solution will be sold by Oracle and its partners.

Under the Microsoft partnership, Oracle enterprise customers will be able to access Oracle cloud applications through an AI-powered voice experience in Microsoft Teams. Once the Oracle Digital Assistant is enabled from the Microsoft Teams app store, users can query Oracle cloud applications, including CX and HCM, through a bot conversation.

Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of software development for Oracle cloud infrastructure, spoke at a Q&A event at OpenWorld Tuesday and told Channel Futures that the expanded partnerships are meant to help customers reach their technology goals, regardless of the vendors who are involved in helping them on that journey.

Oracle’s Clay Magouyrk at OpenWorld 2019

“We’re going after the types of customers who want more control in their VMware deployments,” said Magouyrk.

Customers have been asking for these kinds of partnerships that will allow them to do more with their infrastructures, he said.

“Everyone I talk to has been positive about these two deals because the companies are so pervasive. What really started this conversation with Microsoft is the fact that we are both cloud providers and we’ve chosen to work together and allow customers to interoperate, which is something people have talked about for a long time. Customers, partners, everyone has been clear that this is the right thing to do.”

Additional expanded partnerships and integrations like these are on the horizon for Oracle as the company grows its offerings to customers, said Magouyrk. “You’ll see more and more of this,” he said. “Sometimes people talk about this like it a choice. I’ve never seen a customer who says they just buy from one vendor.”

Hyoun Park, principal analyst at Amalgam Insights, said both the VMware and Microsoft partnership expansions are good for customers and the channel.

Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park

“It’s amazing to see things like Microsoft SQL Server running on Oracle Cloud,” he said. “Nobody would have expected that a few years ago. Oracle is making a multicloud play. They have joint offerings with Microsoft through their connected cloud and VMware is definitely a multicloud support solution.”

Oracle cloud is trying to position itself to be sold with other clouds with the goal of eventually winning over all those workloads for Oracle, said Park.

“This intermediate stage is going to make it easier to sell Oracle and another cloud” for channel partners. “Oracle needs to pick it up in the cloud to catch up to Amazon. Oracles sees one target in the cloud, and it is Amazon.”