Oracle turns rivals into partners in pursuit of cloud ambitions

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Oracle announced a partnership with Amazon’s cloud unit, cementing its strategy of joining with once sworn rivals, and finding its own niche in the cloud and artificial intelligence era. The Austin-based tech giant, which has lagged behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google in cloud-computing for years, has now built partnerships with all of them.

And it is doing so by wielding the flagship database software that has for decades powered large businesses’ operations, transactions and customer data. Safra Catz, Oracle’s chief executive, said in an interview that the major cloud providers recognize that their customers aren’t doing away with Oracle databases. Rather than running them on-premises, or inside data centers, they want to use them in cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.

That is the basis of Oracle’s alliances with those three companies, which give customers the option to use its relational databases inside its partners’ cloud platforms. To enable faster processing between them, Oracle puts its own hardware inside of its partners’ data centers. In some ways, the Oracle and Amazon partnership lowers the temperature between the two companies: Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison has directed insults at Amazon’s services, and the two have waged a decadelong battle over their competing cloud and database products.