Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chairman, and chief technology officer, has been competing against Microsoft in database software for more than 30 years. In addition, he has dealt with clients who want to connect their Oracle and Microsoft products. In spite of this, he hadn’t visited Microsoft’s headquarters outside Seattle until this week.

In town, he appeared alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to announce the expansion of their collaboration. Using Microsoft’s Azure public-cloud service for hosting applications, Oracle is putting its Exadata hardware, which contains servers for databases and storage, into Microsoft’s data centers.

Rather than having to install Oracle hardware in their own data centers or use Oracle’s public cloud, organizations will be able to use Azure to store Oracle’s database software. Applications will be able to quickly access data from Oracle databases by placing the equipment in Azure data centers.

On Oracle’s earnings call with analysts on Monday, Ellison teased the announcement and said it was nice to be here. I’m actually visiting Redmond for the first time. That’s hard to believe. I waited until very late in my career to make this trip.”

In his speech, Nadella cited a memory from his early years, before he managed teams building Azure, the Bing search engine, and Dynamics sales software. Microsoft hired him as a program manager in the Windows developer relations group in 1992 after he left Sun Microsystems.

“The first week I came to Microsoft, they asked me to sort of get ISVs onto Windows NT,” Nadella recalled. My response was, “We can’t get ISVs on Windows NT without Oracle on Windows NT first.”

As a result of this collaboration, Nadella said companies might be able to move workloads from their current data centers to the public cloud more quickly.