Microsoft and Oracle have some kind of major joint announcement they will be making very soon. Microsoft has sent out a media alert to reveal that it will be teaming up with Oracle for the announcement on Thursday, September 14 starting at 1 pm Pacific time (4 pm Eastern time).
The announcement will be livestreamed on Microsoft"s website from the company"s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The event will feature Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison.
That"s basically all either company will reveal about this "partnership update" at this stage. In the past, the two tech giants have been both competitors as well as business collaborators.
In the recent past, Microsoft and Oracle have revealed partnerships that would allow customers to run enterprise workloads on their cloud services, combining Azure features like Analytics and AI with Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database.
That partnership was later expanded so that customers could access Oracle Cloud Applications through a conversational AI experience in Microsoft Teams.
It"s likely that the announcement that will be made by Nadella and Ellison will be a similar cloud-based partnership. Whether or not it will involve Oracle using Microsoft"s recent generative AI services like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise, and more remains to be seen.
One thing that is interesting about this upcoming announcement is the timing. The live stream will begin at 4 pm Eastern time on Thursday. That"s also when the US stock markets stop trading for the day.
Sometimes, major companies with huge announcements like to make them after the stock trading day is over so that the markets can have time to figure out if the news might be good or bad for the businesses. In any case, we won"t have to speculate for very long as the reveal is two days and a few more hours from now.