There are many reasons why the new Oracle and Microsoft merged cloud makes great business sense.  Chief among them is the elimination of barriers that a traditional multicloud presents. The eradication of cloud barriers and vendor borders creates an environment where data can be more readily accessed. This means data is available wherever it is needed without becoming isolated on a data island or siloed in apps.

Banishing the Devil in the Details of Data Islands

Fragmentation is a key barrier to overcome if an organization is to harvest value from all of its data. Eliminating this barrier has been the long and valiant quest of several IT technologies, but each has its shortcomings–especially with the advent of new data sources such as IoT and applications such as self-service business intelligence (BI).

“Data flows from a growing number of sources, including customer transactions, marketing automation systems and the Internet of Things,” according to a report in Gigabit magazine. “This has often resulted in ‘data islands’ across databases and legacy archival systems, with inefficient data duplication and multiple, disconnected repositories of data with inconsistent structures.”

Certainly, the API movement strives to address many of these issues through multiple app integrations. But those efforts have met with mixed success, depending in part on IT’s time and talent availability. Even so, they are helpful. But app integrations alone often aren’t enough to achieve true data ubiquity.

Partner Benefit:

By merging two clouds as Oracle and Microsoft have done, data is no longer stranded on islands. Thus, many of the complicated and time-consuming retrieval and integration efforts can be simplified or eliminated. This enables higher profit margins via higher efficiencies for partners.

Since many large organizations already use Oracle and Microsoft Azure, implementation of the new merged cloud takes less time since the bones of the architecture are already present. Partners can deploy all the new features and capabilities with a minimum of fuss and staff involvement.

Additional efficiencies can be gained through the cross-cloud support. For example, the deployment of custom apps and popular packaged Oracle applications is fully supported on both clouds. That includes JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail, and Hyperion on Azure with Oracle databases–such as RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database–deployed in Oracle Cloud. Those Oracle applications will also soon be certified to run on Azure with Oracle databases in Oracle Cloud.

Unshackled Users

But data is not the only thing freed in this integration at the cloud level; users are, too.

In an important breakthrough for Oracle and Microsoft Azure, users can now leverage the strength of both clouds without having to interact with them as separate entities. This means that users can transfer data, cross-provision via either vendor’s console, use a single sign-on and a variety of templates that work for both clouds, collaborate across the clouds, and access world-class support from either vendor for cross-cloud problem resolutions.

There’s even a collaborative support model designed to help partners and IT organizations rapidly deploy these new capabilities for users. The relationships partners and IT organizations have with Oracle and Microsoft remain intact and are strengthened through combined support across the board.

 Partner Benefit:

This leveraging of relationships is more powerful considering that the majority of large enterprises around the world use both Oracle and Microsoft already. It makes good business sense for partners to dovetail Oracle- and Microsoft-based initiatives, custom app development, and support for two of the world’s most powerful cloud platforms for their clients. It’s a case of the sum being greater than the parts, and the effort being rewarded by a greater sum at checkout.

Private Network Connections

This newly merged cloud offers a private network connection between Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which users can access via Oracle FastConnect or Microsoft ExpressRoute. No third-party or configuration carriers are needed for IT organizations or power users to gain access and leverage this dedicated, high-bandwidth, low-latency network. But some training is helpful, if only in familiarizing IT and users with all the ways this high-speed network can be leveraged.

For example, the virtual private network enables users to seamlessly use both clouds as if they were an omnicloud, a concept like that of an omnichannel, to multi-cloud environments. Users can thus extend their on-premises data centers and “at the edge” distributed data centers to one cloud, thereby extending to both.

Partner Benefit:

In short, users can transfer data to the cloud and between these two clouds much easier and faster. That’s no small feat or relief. Data transfers have long been the bane of data scientists. The common cost and time delays frustrate time-sensitive workloads and quickly devour tight budgets. In many cases, this new merged cloud substantially reduces data transfer times and costs.

Single sign-on further enables a seamless experience on the Microsoft and Oracle clouds and applications. Unified identity and access management also automates user provisioning for resource management across Azure and Oracle Cloud, further improving the user experience.

Combined, this leads to an improved customer experience for partners, as well. Once the merged cloud is implemented and training has progressed, partners may find increased customer loyalty for their own brand and repeat business as a result. Improving deployment and integration efficiencies frees time for both partners and their clients to pursue other digitalization initiatives for mutual benefit.

Future posts will breakdown other advantages in using the Oracle and Microsoft merged cloud. Meanwhile, join us at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco this September to hear more insights around this exciting union!

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.