Oracle and Microsoft are continuing their quest to make their respective cloud services easier for joint customers to deploy and manage, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Their latest stride in this direction is the new Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure which lets Microsoft Azure customers run and manage Oracle databases running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The service was announced Wednesday in a virtual keynote by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison.

“Customers are very excited about this because customers like choices. Now you have choices,” Ellison said.

Practically speaking, the new service lets Azure customers manage their Oracle Autonomous Database or Oracle Exadata Database Service from their familiar Azure console and use Azure analytics tools like PowerBI and Synapse against data in those databases.

To be clear, shared customers—companies that include AT&T, Marriott International, Veritas, and SGS—could already connect Azure with Oracle databases running on OCI, but doing so required manual configuration and technical expertise. Oracle and Microsoft collaborated on the new service to fulfill customer requests for a more integrated experience, Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of OCI, told The Journal.

Increasingly, businesses see multicloud adoption as the new normal. Being able to benefit from both clouds “is a real win for customers,” Corey Sanders, corporate vice president of Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion said in the same article.

The Oracle Database Service for Azure builds on work the two companies have already done on the Oracle Interconnect for Azure, announced three years ago. The secure, private link between the companies’ respective clouds supports data transmission, queries, API calls, and other interactions, typically with under two milliseconds of latency. That means customers can securely run Microsoft services against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency.

Check out ZDNet, InfoWorld,  SiliconANGLE, TechTarget and Seeking Alpha for additional reporting on the cloud database service, and stay tuned to hear more about how Oracle will help customers succeed in the multicloud world.