Microsoft and Oracle are about to make a big announcement together. Microsoft has issued a notice to the media announcing that it will join forces with Oracle, starting at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time (4:00 p.m. Eastern time) on Thursday, September 14th.
Microsoft will host a live broadcast on its website at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison will attend the event.
That's basically all the information the two companies will reveal about this "collaboration update" at this stage. In the past, the two tech giants were both competitors and business collaborators.
Recently, Microsoft and Oracle have revealed that they will establish a partnership to allow customers to run enterprise workloads on their respective cloud services, combining Azure's capabilities such as analytics and artificial intelligence with Oracle cloud services such as autonomous databases.
The partnership has since been expanded so that customers can access Oracle Cloud applications through conversational AI experiences in Microsoft Teams.
What Nadella and Ellison are about to announce is likely to be a similar cloud-based partnership. It remains to be seen whether Oracle will use Microsoft's recently launched generative artificial intelligence services, such as Microsoft365Copilot, BingChatEnterprise, etc.
One interesting thing about the upcoming announcement is the timing. The live broadcast will begin at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday. This also happens to be when the U.S. stock market closes.
Sometimes, big companies with big news like to release it after the stock trading day ends, so that the market has time to judge whether the news is good or bad for the company. Regardless, we don't have to speculate for too long since the reveal is only two days and a few hours from now.