Oracle, Microsoft play nice on the collaboration front

Dive Brief:

Oracle is expanding its partnership with Microsoft, offering an integration of Oracle Digital Assistant for Microsoft Teams, according to a company announcement.
The partnership is further cementing the way customers handle workloads that move across Microsoft 365 and Oracle Cloud, according to Suhas Uliyar, vice president of AI and digital assistant at Oracle, in the announcement. "Skills from Oracle Digital Assistant are auto provisioned and auto configured," building off Team's existing capabilities.
Oracle Cloud Applications are now accessible for enterprise customers through "an AI-powered voice experience in Teams," according to the announcement. Oracle's customer experience and human capital management capabilities can be summoned using bot conversation.

Dive Insight:

The integration of Oracle Digital Assistant into Microsoft Teams is meant to eliminate unnecessary friction in communication and collaboration. Users won't have to flip between applications to carry out tasks.

In 2017, Oracle announced a similar partnership with Slack — Teams' largest competitor in the collaboration software space — which allowed Slack's integration into Oracle's legacy enterprise software.

But Slack had a moldable business strategy, servicing only the collaboration market. Microsoft, a fellow legacy provider, competes with Oracle across technology domains. But as collaboration is more emphasized, neither company can afford to lose out on possible integrations.

While Oracle has a reputation for not always playing nice with its competitors, Microsoft recently become known for having a collaborative spirit, partnering with companies to fill its gaps.

The two companies announced a partnership earlier this year in cloud services to allow customers to run equal workloads in each cloud. The move allowed for connection between Oracle's autonomous database to Azure's analytics and artificial intelligence offerings.

Having applications from either provider capable of running in both clouds is an interoperability power play and one Oracle is trying to reinforce further with Teams.