Microsoft and Oracle on Wednesday announced a cloud interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Enterprises can now connect Azure services, like Analytics and AI, to Oracle Cloud services, like Autonomous Database.

Connecting Azure and Oracle Cloud through network and identity interoperability makes lift-and-improve migrations seamless. This partnership delivers direct network connectivity between two clouds, while continuing to provide customer service and support to enterprises. In addition to providing interoperability for businesses running Oracle software on Oracle Cloud and Microsoft software on Azure, it enables new 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.

The companies are today making available a new set of capabilities:

• Connect Azure and Oracle Cloud. This direct interconnect is available starting today in Ashburn (North America) and Azure US East, with plans to expand additional regions in the future.
• Unified identity and access management, via a unified single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning, to manage resources across Azure and Oracle Cloud. Also available in early preview today, Oracle applications can use Azure Active Directory as the identity provider and for conditional access.
• Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications (JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail, Hyperion) on Azure with Oracle databases (RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database) deployed in Oracle Cloud. The same Oracle applications will also be certified to run on Azure with Oracle databases in Oracle Cloud.
• A collaborative support model to help IT organizations deploy these new capabilities while enabling them to leverage existing customer support relationships and processes.
• Oracle Database will continue to be certified to run in Azure on various operating systems, including Windows Server and Oracle Linux.

Some unanswered questions about the deal include whether customers would face data transfer fees for moving large amounts of information back and forth between services.

The agreement is targeting big business users, with the two companies to unite against cloud computing leader Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services.

Both Oracle and Microsoft are courting large businesses and government customers considering moving computing tasks currently handled in their own data centers to cloud providers.

AWS, the largest cloud computing provider, is encroaching on many large businesses and government customers, including in Oracle’s historical stronghold in the database market.

Microsoft has previously inked a deal with German software maker SAP SE and Adobe Inc to make their services work better together.