Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. are integrating their competing public cloud platforms to form a unified front against Amazon Web Services Inc., their common rival.

The partnership, which the companies announced this morning, has several components. The first is a direct network link between Microsoft’s Azure and Oracle Cloud that will facilitate faster data sharing between the platforms. Information will travel over 10-gigabit-per-second connections that the companies say are much speedier, as well as more reliable, than the public web.

The direct network link is already available in Oracle’s Ashburg, Virginia cloud facility and Azure US East. The companies will expand availability to more regions over time, as well as roll out joint security features intended to bring their platforms even closer together.

Microsoft and Oracle are promising to deliver what they describe as unified identity management. Enterprises will gain the ability to use a single system, Microsoft’s Active Directory, to centrally manage infrastructure access across Azure and Oracle Cloud. That will allow administrators to control which applications can use what resources in one place, plus log into both cloud platforms using the same credentials instead of separate accounts.

Microsoft and Oracle see the integrations being used in two main ways. Vinay Kumar, the database maker’s vice president of product management, wrote that one use case for enterprises will be harnessing the unified identity features to consolidate access control across Azure and Oracle Cloud. This could have broad appeal given that many in the Fortune 500 already use both Azure and Oracle products.

In the longer run, Kumar sees enterprises splitting up their applications between the providers’ cloud platforms. The direct network link will enable workloads running on Azure, such as analytics systems, to use Oracle’s cloud-based databases to store and process information.

“A low-latency connection between the clouds lets customers choose preferred components for each application, allowing a single consistent application with separate parts running in the optimal cloud for each technology stack,” Kumar wrote in a blog post. He added this cross-cloud connectivity will be available for both custom software and Oracle business applications deployed in Azure.

The companies will provide joint support services along with resources such as deployment guides to encourage adoption. The Wikibon Project Chief Analyst and SiliconANGLE Media Inc. co-Chief Executive Dave Vellante commented that for Microsoft, the partnership represents a “continuation of its open developer community posture.”

“Microsoft is in a position to capture more cloud dollars because it’s giving Oracle customers more choice and a path to Microsoft [Azure],” he said. “It is also a path for Microsoft to participate in more mission-critical environments characterized by Oracle.”

For Oracle, he said, “it’s still all about the database and gives customers a way to run their Oracle database on the Oracle Cloud but move some of their app portfolio to Azure.”

The partnership takes direct aim at AWS, which is by far the biggest player in the cloud market with an estimated 33% market share. Vellante believes that it’s “just a matter of time before AWS goes after multicloud” as well. The Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary is already pursuing an ecosystem approach over in the hybrid cloud market, where it has teamed up with VMware Inc. to launch a series of joint solutions.

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