Oracle and Microsoft are joining forces to level up their AI game. The two tech giants have signed a multi-year agreement, which will focus on enhancing how Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, handles conversational searches.
Under this new partnership, Microsoft is capitalising on the capabilities of both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI infrastructure and Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure to power AI models for daily use in Bing’s conversational searches. This joint effort is set to significantly enhance the search experience for users around the globe.
The synergy between Oracle and Microsoft is seamlessly facilitated by the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, a pivotal component that enables Microsoft to harness the power of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). AKS is used to efficiently orchestrate OCI Compute resources at a massive scale, a vital requirement to meet the surging demand for Bing’s conversational search functionality.
The heart of this collaboration lies in the necessity for robust computing infrastructure to support the evaluation and analysis of search results generated by Bing’s inference model. These results, powered by AI, are critical in delivering relevant and timely information to users. This infrastructure requires thousands of compute and storage instances and tens of thousands of GPUs that can work in parallel, effectively creating a single supercomputer network that operates over a multi-terabit network.
“Generative AI is a monumental technological leap and Oracle is enabling Microsoft and thousands of other businesses to build and run new products with our OCI AI capabilities,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “By furthering our collaboration with Microsoft, we are able to help bring new experiences to more people around the world.”
Divya Kumar, Global Head of Marketing for Search & AI at Microsoft, highlighted the company’s commitment to leveraging the latest advancements in AI to deliver a significantly improved search experience to people worldwide.
She said, “Our collaboration with Oracle and use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, along with our Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, will expand access to customers and improve the speed of many of our search results.”
Oracle & Microsoft: Elevating cloud and AI innovations
The partnership to enhance Bing is another significant phase in the ongoing collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft. Back in September, these technology giants made waves with the announcement of ‘Oracle Database@Azure,’ a new service that grants customers direct entry to Oracle’s database services hosted within Microsoft Azure data centers.
This ambitious undertaking strives to unite the best of two worlds, melding the robust performance, scalability, and workload availability synonymous with Oracle Database on OCI with the security, adaptability, and top-tier services characteristic of Microsoft Azure. Notably, it extends the privilege of accessing Microsoft’s AI services, including the esteemed Azure OpenAI, to customers.
The ultimate goal of this partnership is to furnish customers with unparalleled flexibility in determining their workload deployment preferences, empowering them to harness the strengths of both Oracle and Microsoft. Simultaneously, it simplifies the cloud procurement and management processes, facilitating a seamless transition to the cloud and the modernisation of IT environments for organisations.
