Google Cloud and Oracle have announced a new partnership aimed at helping customers seamlessly migrate and run their their workload across the two platforms.

Google is currently the third-largest cloud provider in the world, behind AWS and Microsoft. CEO Thomas Kurian has made no secret of his intention to overtake Microsoft for the second spot, but those ambitions have yet come to fruition, or even threaten to do so. Meanwhile, Oracle usually usually places sixth or seventh, depending on various factors.

The two companies clearly see the benefit of teaming up, making it easier for customers to run their workflows across the two platforms, as emphasized by Google’s Gurmeet (GG) Goindi and Oracle’s Karan Batta:

It provides a rich set of interoperable solutions that make it easy for our joint customers to migrate, modernize, and manage their Oracle-based applications in the cloud. With unified engineering, product, and commercial model, these integrated solutions deliver choice and flexibility backed by the end-to-end enterprise-class collaborative support model that our joint customers have relied on over the years. At the core of this partnership is the Oracle Database@Google Cloud. Oracle will directly host, operate and manage Oracle database services natively within and from the Google Cloud data centers, beginning with regional footprints in North America and Europe, and plans to rapidly expand globally.

The executives says customers have been asking for a unified framework between the two companies for year:

Over the years, joint enterprise customers expressed interest in a unified framework that allows them to continue to benefit from Oracle’s database and enterprise application offerings while seamlessly complemented with Google Cloud offerings and AI solutions such as Gemini and Vertex AI to modernize and accelerate cloud migrations. However, as customers explored the existing multi-vendor, multi-cloud options, these solutions lacked sufficient choice and the native integration options to meet customers’ technical and commercial requirements. Customers had to further deal with additional costs such as cross-cloud data transfer charges, or the lack of end-to-end enterprise-grade support for these architectures.

Customers will be able to connect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Google Cloud without paying cross-cloud data transfer chargers, and the two companies will support running Oracle app on Google Cloud.

We are tremendously excited about the opportunities this partnership unlocks for our customers. We are committed to continue innovating around these unified solutions on our customers’ behalf with a focus on delivering cost-effective choices that can meet the performance, availability and security requirements of their most demanding applications and database workloads.