 Thinking back over the past 15 years of the modern cloud computing era, we were first told that cloud was only for startups. It was for experiments and tire kickers. No IT exec would ever move production workloads or strategic data into the cloud. No financial services firm as another example would ever move anything into the cloud. Multi-cloud then emerged as a symptom of multi-vendor or of mergers and acquisitions or both. Fast forward now to 2022 and customers clearly want to take advantage of the best services that each cloud offers. For example, Azure for Microsoft apps, Amazon for IS, Google Cloud for AI, Oracle for database, et cetera. However, this approach requires expertise in each cloud's primitives, tools and APIs. And it puts the burden on customers to integrate apps and workloads across clouds which increases cost, it exposes security risks and it creates time to market friction. The future of cloud is no longer just on-prem to cloud or so-called hybrid, but cloud to cloud, what many call multi-cloud and at theCUBE, we like to think beyond the conventional view of multi-cloud and it's why we use the term super cloud as a metaphor for cross-cloud services that are purpose built to solve a specific problem. While at the same time leveraging the best that various cloud providers have to offer. Karan Bhatta is the Vice President of Product Management at OCI for Oracle and Chris Rice is the Vice President of Software Development at Oracle Database and both are joining me in this CUBE conversation to discuss how Oracle and Microsoft are helping customers address cross-cloud integration issues making it possible for customers to use popular Azure-based tools and Oracle databases and what the firms claim is a simplified, secure and more facile experience effectively making two clouds appear as one to developers and users. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, Dave. Karan, let's start with the news. What are you announcing? Why is it important to each company and what does it mean for your customers? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Dave. I think, you know, what I can tell you is Microsoft and Oracle actually share a massive enterprise customer base. The same customers that are using Office 365 are also the same customer that are storing their critical mission, critical data on Oracle Database. So we have thousands of customers that we share jointly and many of them use all sorts of different products from both technology companies and you know, multi-cloud as you sort of rightly pointed out has become the right approach for a lot of our customers to be able to run applications across different cloud providers in a very simplistic manner. You know, that's why we're, you know with this new announcement we're reducing the complexity of connecting these things together. You know, all of the platform level capabilities and that working capabilities, the identity management of it. You know, we're calling this new service Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure and it really brings together a cohesive Azure-like experience for Oracle customers. It's, you know, it's going to be a new way to actually deploy multi-cloud applications. How is this service different from what the Oracle Interconnect for Azure partnership that you announced pre-pandemic, I think it was 2019? Right, right, right. So almost two years ago, you know we announced this partnership with Microsoft that essentially interconnects the two data center regions from Azure and from Oracle. And you know, it provided a great opportunity for customers to start their multi-cloud journey by making things like data transfer fees free, et cetera. And now we're close to 11 regions globally, you know for those interconnected regions. The feedback that we got from customers was, you know it was a great step in the right direction but they needed more. And so this experience essentially builds on top of the physical interconnect on the data center side by giving customers an Azure-like experience that allows them to basically deploy Oracle databases in a very cohesive fashion with their Azure applications. It also gives them things like, you know joint support, it gives them things like, you know joint billing data, et cetera. But it basically allows them to get a first-class experience for Oracle database services, you know across the two clouds. It's interesting, I mean I think back to the history of the industry, you know before Oracle acquired Sun it would work with every hardware company and then of course, you know had its own hardware and now it's working with Microsoft who's in essence is a platform, you know infrastructure company. So it's quite a journey. Chris, I wonder if we could bring you into the conversation. What Oracle databases can Azure customers access now? Is that, where does autonomous fit? Is that part of the package? Yeah, absolutely. So the initial offering is going to have all flavors of the Oracle database cloud. So that includes what we call now the base database which is database in a VM, the workhorse of the XSES. So if you truly need the extra horsepower of the exadata machine, and of course it's going to include autonomous right out of the gate. So for customers that want to kick the tires on an Oracle database link with Azure there's no faster path than using autonomous. Yes, a lot of integration that you guys have done. Well, how does this service compare to other, you know, customers like to compare they're always talking about their choices. How does it compare to others? How, what is the cost associated with this? What can you tell us? So from a cost stance, there's no extra costs. So the only cost is on the base service. So if you get the autonomous, the base database, the exadata, your cost is in that base service. And we include all this plumbing that we've done to make it work best with Azure. And that includes wiring the metrics, the logs, the vent home, the audit records to the Azure side of the house. And what are the things are like this out there? Can you share with us? What should customers, you know, compare this to? So the majority of what customers have done so far is it is DIY. So multi-cloud to date has been very DIY. Anything could be done that we've done. However, customers that have to roll up their sleeves, they'd have to learn both clouds, learn the nomenclature of both clouds. They'd have to learn the networking infrastructure and they'd really have to roll their sleeves up in DIY it. What we've done is we've done all that work for them. So it's as simple as a few most clicks in the two clouds can be talking together. Thank you, okay. Con, you ever see the movie, Good Morning Vietnam? And they redact out all the words in the news that they didn't want read on the news. And so here, Microsoft and Oracle, they're talking about multi-cloud. Google sort of talks about unifying cross-cloud developer experiences with Anthos. When you go to like re-invent, the word multi-cloud is redacted like the movie. Do you anticipate customers are going to push more from multi-cloud in the future? What are you hearing? Yeah, absolutely. I think customers are going to demand this of their cloud providers in the future. I think these are going to be table stakes moving forward. As you rightly pointed out, Dave, I think customers and actually cloud providers are focused on mostly transition from on-prem to the cloud. And I think in the future, once everybody's picked their first cloud provider, it's going to be, the focus is going to shift from that to the interoperability across these two clouds or multiple clouds. Customers will want to have leverage against other cloud providers. Customers will want to pick the best of breed, complimentary services, et cetera, and also have decisions based on economics. So I think there's going to be a massive acceleration of customers who want the support from all of their cloud providers, which is why we're basically simply listening to customer feedback. And as mentioned earlier, we share so many different customers together, it totally made sense for Microsoft inorable to start investing in it. This is not the entire answer. I think it's start of this journey in the future. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I never say never with the hyperscalers or any large technology company. I wonder, Karan, if we could stay with you, can you give us some practical examples of what this service means for customers, how it's going to help them do something that they couldn't do before? What should we be focused on? Yeah, absolutely. I think it opens up a whole set of new possibilities. I mentioned earlier, kind of made a statement where the world's data kind of lives on Oracle databases. It's the core of any mission critical data today. It's still the most popular database used in the world. And so customers want to be able to modify, they want to be able to extract more information and get more knowledge out of their data. And this opens up the possibility where you can use, you can have access to that Oracle database from Azure and you're able to connect it to all the complimentary services which allow you to extract more knowledge or insight out of that data. So whether you're moving it into, let's say Azure Synapse Analytics to do analytics workloads or whether you're moving it to the Hadoop cluster using Azure HD Insight, or you're simply just looking at the data in different forms and factors through Power BI. I think it opens up a whole new set of possibilities, you just couldn't do it before. On the second hand, it also helps you modernize your existing on-premise estate of Oracle. So we have the largest bags, the largest financial services customers, the largest government customers running the largest Exadata footprint on-premise. It helps you modernize that into the cloud and then use complimentary services from Azure. Got it. Chris, what's the support model look like for this new service? Who's throat do I choke? I was going to say, so you brought us back to when we had multiple vendors in the vendors, we've all lived through it, right? Vendors pointed fingers at each other. So keeping that in mind, what we've done is we have a collaborative plan with Microsoft in place. So building on the interconnect from 2019, we have that collaborative support model. So right in this new console that we've built, you can log a ticket and immediately both sides will be aware of the context and what's going on so that we can resolve those problems and avoid the finger pruning of vendor at vendor. Okay, great. So if somebody's to pick up a broom and start sweeping and fix the problem, I love it. To both of you guys, maybe you could kind of riff a little bit on the future. I mean, we use this term super cloud, which is, you know, cross multiple clouds, so you're doing that. And we envision, you know, this wonderful globally distributed system where you don't even think about the underlying infrastructure. Are you considering partnering with other major cloud providers to offer similar services or are you going to go sort of deeper with Azure? What's your feeling on that? I think, you know, I think the capability here that we've built isn't specific to Azure for sure. I think there's absolutely possibility of, you know, working with other clouds in the future. I think, you know, we'll continue to sort of listen to our feedback from our largest customers, you know, and if the market demands, you know, it's going to be, as I said, table stakes. And, you know, as I said earlier, and I think you'll be in the best interest of all the cloud providers to just work together in the future. And Dave, to go back on the other half of your question, are we going to go deeper? We are going to be going deeper. So today we've gone far enough that, like I said, metrics, logs, those things are flowing. We're also in progress of looking at the rest of the portfolio in Azure and seeing which things can and should integrate more tightly with OCI. So as Karan said, broader, but also deeper at the same time. Great, thank you. The last question is, you know, we use this term super cloud to me anyway. And us, multi-cloud has largely been, I'm running, you know, on different clouds. It's sort of a symptom, just kind of the way things shook out. And maybe this, maybe super cloud is what multi-cloud should be. But what do you think are the key ingredients that make multi-cloud real? Lots of people are talking about multi-cloud. What makes it tangible? I think, you know, to begin with, I think it's removing the complexity of learning new clouds, right? I think that's the biggest challenge that customers have is you've already picked one cloud, you've trained your employees, you've trained your developers and your application, you know, engineers and learning a new cloud, onboarding a new cloud is an extensive challenge and requires a lot of time and effort. And I think what the other cloud providers can do is actually make sure that they provide these experiences that obfuscate all of the guts and all of the plumbing under the cover so that the customer doesn't have to learn new things. I think they can focus on their business value, which is actually running the app and running the database. I think they can sort of leave the infrastructure component to the cloud providers that actually have the right interoperability, the right APIs, et cetera. So I think the experience is going to be critical moving forward. Chris, anything you'd add to that? Bring us home, if you would. The things I would add is back to observability and manageability. So today, a lot of customers consider themselves multi-cloud if they're leveraging two clouds. What we're truly talking about is a multi-cloud workload where a compute node on cloud A is talking to a database on Oracle, things like that. So then you get into the observability of the stack so that you can monitor and react to how the things are going. So I think it has to go a hair higher in that these layers of observing the entire multi-cloud experiences in one place. That's great, guys. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and share congratulations on the progress. I love that we have you guys back and we can see how you're moving forward, collaborating, customers, it's a win-win-win. So appreciate your time. Absolutely. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.