Oracle CloudWorld 2024 brought several technology advancements. The most significant announcement was the partnership with AWS, with Oracle President and CTO Larry Ellison and AWS CEO Matt Garman on stage discussing the value their customers can expect.
Customers have been asking for it for some time and they will have it starting in December. The deal with AWS completes the trio of major partners for Oracle, with their database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) directly in AWSGoogle Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Here are my thoughts on other announcements from the conference, with a focus on analytics and AI.
Redefining the customer-centric approach
The customer-centric approach was particularly visible at the event. The first keynote aimed to put this idea into practice by bringing a few major customers on stage, including Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
The most memorable moment for me was seeing La’Naia Jones, the CIA’s CIO, on stage. The CIA was Oracle’s first customer and continues to leverage Oracle’s infrastructure extensively in a variety of ways, making it hard to argue with Oracle’s ability to meet the highest security, scalability, and performance requirements of what is arguably the world’s largest intelligence agency.
This customer access extended to the Analyst Summit, where the Analyst Relations team provided incredible access to many customers at different stages of their AI journey. These are the conversations I personally love. What’s good? What’s bad? What’s noisy? Talking to customers tells the real story. And between OCI, Oracle Analytics Cloud and Fusion Data Intelligenceto name a few, they were very happy not only with what they had today, but also with the direction Oracle was going.
AI agents lead the way
Owning the infrastructure and the application stack gives Oracle an advantage that virtually no other tech company has. It’s almost unfair that Oracle is so entrenched in the enterprise application world that it can innovate so quickly across industries. And when customers embrace the entire stack, the optimizations are obvious. This was reflected in the focus on industry-specific announcements.
I was most surprised by their AI agent story and of all their announcements, this one was my favorite. They shared over 50 AI assistants that will help their customers write, advise, and recommend stocks.
Agents are being integrated into their applications, allowing customers to expect significant productivity gains across finance, supply chain, human resources, sales, marketing, and service. This high number of agents with such detail about specific uses sets a new standard for what AI agent announcements from the vendor community should look like in the future. Kudos to Oracle for their transparency and commitment to fostering the development of AI agents for use in their applications.
Some of the specific application updates that stood out to me include new user experience enhancements in Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, a new energy and water data intelligence solution, and healthcare capabilities like medical supply tracking, automated replenishment, and real-time inventory visibility. The goal of all of these new products is to help organizations unify their data, accelerate AI, increase productivity, expand visibility, and speed up processes.
OIC Updates
There have been several OCI updates, but for me the most important ones were Oracle’s launch of a new Generative AI RAG Agent This is a fully managed service. The update makes it easier to use Oracle AI Vector Search without any manual integration.
The second major update was the addition of capabilities to help customers accelerate application development and deployment on OCI with the new Oracle Code Assist. Oracle also launched a massive AI supercomputer in the cloud and increased its focus on AI and data sovereignty with Nvidia helping organizations build and maintain sovereign AI models in their country or retain AI-generated data with strong data residency controls.
New Core Data Lake
The last big one for me is the Introducing Oracle Intelligent Data Lake serve as the foundation for the Oracle Data Intelligence platform, bringing together open data formats, a unified catalog, and modern developer experiences.
You might think Oracle is behind the curve on this, and at first glance, you’d be right. Oracle’s difference is that it owns the entire stack. The application layer and its tight integration with everything else Oracle provides is what really makes the magic happen. And right now, no one else can provide such a complete story across so many business applications other than Oracle. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s just a fact.
Mike Leone is a Principal Analyst in TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, where he covers data, analytics, and AI.
Enterprise Strategy Group analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
