By Tony Rost
Global Managing Director
Cloud

As Microsoft and Oracle launch a major new multi-cloud partnership, Logic can help retailers maximize the value of this new opportunity.

Many retailers find that they need to take advantage of the vendor-specific capabilities across multiple clouds in order to meet their technical and business requirements. That’s why 76% of companies are adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches, according to one recent analyst report.

However, few retailers have the bandwidth (or budgets) to juggle multiple clouds. Too often, sharing data and workloads—critical to multi-cloud success—has meant expensive, time-consuming rearchitecting and re-platforming.

A game-changing partnership

When Microsoft Azure Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) announced a major new interoperability agreement, we were thrilled. This groundbreaking partnership is going to help our clients leverage the best of both cloud environments—and more easily extract critical insights across all their retail data.

And just a few weeks after the partnership was announced, we officially announced that Logic, already a long-time gold-status Oracle partner, has been awarded Microsoft’s Gold Cloud Platform partner status.

Now, the Oracle and Microsoft partnership simplifies and streamlines the process of ensuring Azure and OCI work seamlessly together.

“With the partnership and interconnect, joint customers can migrate their workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure without the need for complex re-architecture or re-platforming.”

– Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President, IDC

“We have multiple clients running Oracle Retail for whom we have developed solutions using .Net core and Azure SQL Databases,” says Grant Wright, Managing Director of Merchandising at Logic. “For example, we’ve worked with retailers on invoice matching functionality, or print-on-demand supplier routing capabilities, which then workflow data across the Oracle suite. In the past, this required the development of complex integration patterns, but now this effort is much faster, highly secure and simpler to deploy.”

Here are some of the ways our customers can benefit:

• Optimize cloud investments. Gain greater flexibility in deciding which workloads to run either Oracle’s or Microsoft’s cloud services based on features, performance, and pricing.
• Simplify data management across clouds. Run Oracle Retail applications on OCI, with distributed data stores on OCI and Microsoft Azure.
• Leverage private, low-latency connectivity. Benefit from superior multi-cloud network performance with a direct interconnect between OCI and Microsoft Azure that provides <2ms latency.

In other words, retailers have more choices about what to use and when/how to use it. They can more seamlessly connect Oracle Autonomous Database with Microsoft analytics and AI services. And they can reduce grunt work while accelerating deployment of a powerful, multi-cloud strategy.

“This partnership between Microsoft and Oracle makes it that much easier for our clients to access and derive insights from the data they already have,” says Graeme McVie, Managing Director of Data at Logic. “For example, our clients running Oracle Retail can use Microsoft Power BI to create reports quickly without the need for additional integration efforts.”

>> Read more about the benefits of the Microsoft/Oracle partnership here. And you can dig into some of the technical nitty-gritty here.

Why Logic?

For retailers wanting to benefit from this new partnership, Logic is the natural choice, and here’s why in a nutshell.

• We’re Azure experts. Again, we are a gold-level partner.
• We’re Oracle experts. We are a gold-level partner, with 25 years’ experience.
• We’re retail experts. We’re the world’s largest consultancy focused exclusively on the retail sector.

Literally no other vendor on earth can claim to be all three. Besides being recognized, we are uniquely able to help retailers, thanks to the seamless, multi-year relationship we have built with both Microsoft and Oracle.

As the Global Managing Director of Logic’s Cloud practice, Tony helps our clients establish the robust cloud platforms they need to power the next-generation customer experiences. He brings more than two decades of experience in cloud and managed services. Tony has served as a vCTO/vCIO for several major companies, including Sony, Disney, and Warner Bros.