Microsoft and Oracle have struck a cloud alliance, giving techies everywhere the opportunity to run applications which are older than you across multiple clouds.

As Microsoft’s announcement on the deal puts it, “ Enterprises can now seamlessly connect Azure services, like Analytics and AI, to Oracle Cloud services, like Autonomous Database.”

Customers will be able to “to run one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within the Oracle Cloud, [and] the partnership delivers a highly optimized, best-of-both-clouds experience.”

Oracle’s statement was more detailed, explaining that the companies “have built a dedicated, high-bandwidth, low-latency private network connection between Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

Furthermore, the deal means unified identity and access management, so “customers and implementations can now use Microsoft’s widely adopted Active Directory service as the identity provider for resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

Customers can thrill to the possibility of “new and innovative scenarios like running Oracle E-Business Suite or Oracle JD Edwards on Azure against an Oracle Autonomous Database running on Exadata infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud.”

That statement might leave some of our younger readers asking “who’s this JD Edwards person?” to which the oldies will reply, it was an ERP vendor focusing on AS/400 systems, which was eventually bought by Peoplesoft, which was itself bought by Oracle in 2005.

Which to some, might seem like ancient history. To others, though, it will represent precisely the challenge facing many large organisations, where applications which may be much older than some of the techies itching to get everything running in the cloud are still crucial to the running of the whole organisation.

While Azure is safely regarded as number two in the cloud race behind AWS, Oracle is barely in the also-ran zone. Last year it turned up at Kubecon touting its vision of a “second generation cloud” with “Star Wars cyber defences” underpinned with AI powered monitoring.”

Oracle has never been regarded as a particularly friendly company to anyone, but if it was going to form an alliance with anyone, Microsoft would seem the obvious choice. Both companies are looking to leverage their long dominance in the enterprise tech world into the cloud. It would be hard to envision Oracle wanting to partner with AWS, while Google arguably doesn’t have the inroads into enterprise.