Three ways on how the Oracle-Microsoft partnership can benefit Startups and SMEs

When Oracle and Microsoft earlier this year decided to join hands, it came as a huge surprise for all of us. As the two software giants cozy-up, skeptics have started to ponder on whether the partnership has been formed to monopolize the market or whether this partnership will even last?

Many skeptics also believe that this is a strategy to monopolize the market by effectively teaming up against their common competitors, the biggest of them being Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

On the other hand, experts who are closely watching and monitoring this cooperation between the titans believe that Oracle and Microsoft are counting on the cloud to fuel their growth, by raising the stakes in their partnership. As these two cloud giants have described this alliance, as a way for their customers to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor.

Whatever the reason for this partnership whether it is done for pure profit or to benefit their customers, start-ups and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises can actually make the most out of this partnership as many of them today are gradually migrating their workloads to the cloud. Over the past couple of years, we have seen massive growth in the number of businesses wanting to shift their workload to the cloud. In fact, according to the study LogicMonitor’s Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud Study, 83 percent of enterprises will have shifted their workload to clouds by 2020.

Here are the three primary areas that SMEs and start-ups can benefit from because of this partnership:

It is more Cost-Effective:

According to the ORACLE Cloud Consultant Ghulam Mustafa, one of the biggest advantages Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises could have is that they would now be able to shift their data to the cloud without shelling out a hefty sum. In his opinion, If the Cloud platforms treat themselves as silos, it puts people/organizations/businesses in an awkward position, because not all these platforms satisfy all of their needs. “Previously when cloud platforms treated themselves as silos, it put businesses in an awkward position as the cloud platform did not meet their needs, and hence they ended up paying more. This fusion between Microsoft and Oracle allows cross-platform sharing making it less expensive and less tedious for shifting of workload,” said Mustafa.

Mustafa who has successfully led IT Cloud Transformation Projects in South Asia, Asia Pacific and in ASEAN region, feels that since most businesses are now shifting to online platforms proper architecture to serve their needs is required. “ migrating the whole workload to cloud can cost a company a lot of money and the pricing is just too complicated, so the migration must benefit the company,” he said, before adding that this partnership can help SMEs shift to cloud without having to make changes to their internal architecture.

Data Interoperability:

Data Interoperability, these days, has become a major issue as these days as many organizations especially small businesses lack options for the data interoperability in a vendor lock-in situation. “SME’s must avoid unnecessary platform changes to complete a 360 Degree view of their multi-tiered and multi-vendor hybrid cloud,” said Mustafa, who works with companies on a daily basis to develop practical solutions and methodologies.

According to the ORACLE Cloud Consultant and Cloud Architect, this partnership makes sense to a lot of small and medium-sized businesses as many of them have workloads written in different programming languages hence this partnership will give them wider choice to second-generation Oracle or Microsoft Clouds. As it aims at helping organizations move their on-premises enterprise applications and host them either to Microsoft's or Oracle's public cloud infrastructure.“ This cross-cloud approach allows businesses to accelerate by giving them the freedom to choose how they want to divide their workloads and working between the two clouds,” he said.

This expanded agreement, therefore, gives enterprises the freedom to decide how they want to spill their workload. They could either use one cloud as a backup cloud or divide their workloads on different clouds to suit the preferences of their specific development teams, as data architects, application developers, and enterprise architects may all have their own preferences.

As Oracle moves to the cloud it brings Autonomous Database with it, Oracle wants to make it easier for customers using Microsoft’s business intelligence and AI services to work with Oracle. On Microsoft’s side, this partnership represents a continued willingness to partner with any and all market leaders and to make it easier for Microsoft clients to work with their client of choice.

Integrated AI capabilities for better customer centric performance

Some of the coolest features are that this second-generation cloud is now embedded with AI-based applications and machine learning-integrated security along with Oracle’s Autonomous Database and Advanced Augmented Analytics.

“These features will enhance the customer-driven experience and can significantly reduce the cost of data management for companies as well as help them organize themselves more efficiently,” he said.

For instance, Oracle recently announced that enterprise customers can now have access to Oracle Cloud applications through an AI-powered voice experience. “The Microsoft and Oracle cloud interoperability partnership makes it much easier for businesses to organize their work. They can now simply converse with the business applications from their Microsoft team interface just as they would with their employees, optimizing the speed at which work can get done,” he said.

According to a statement issued by Oracle, companies now can complete daily work more efficiently as the AI-trained conversational access will not require additional employee training and enable them to run their enterprise workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Cloud.